The Science Circuit

Image credit:   https://openai.com/index/dall-e/     Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a very common type of cancer, and treatment options beyond surgery can be quite limited. While immunotherapy, which helps your own immune system fight cancer, has shown great success in some cancers like melanoma and lung cancer, it's currently only effective for a small number of metastatic CRC cases. This means it's really important to understand more about the environment within and around the tumour – known as the   tumour microenvironment (TME)   – to find new ways to improve treatments. This study looked closely at the cells making up the TME in CRC, analysing over 54,000 cells from both tumour tissue and nearby normal tissue. They used advanced techniques like single-cell RNA sequencing, which lets researchers see the genetic activity in individual cells, and spatial transcriptomics, which shows where different cells are located within the tissue. One of the main findings was ...

  Image credit:   https://openai.com/index/dall-e/     Systemic sclerosis (SSc), sometimes called scleroderma, is a complex disease where the body produces too much collagen, leading to a painful hardening and thickening of the skin and sometimes internal organs. At the heart of this process are cells called fibroblasts. Fibroblasts are normally the architects of our tissues, building the structural framework, but in SSc, they become overactive and produce excessive collagen and other proteins, leading to fibrosis (scarring). Scientists know that fibroblasts are central to SSc, but studying them has been tricky. Standard methods of growing fibroblasts in the lab haven't fully captured the complex ways these cells behave inside the body. This new research, published in JCI Insight by Kristina E.N. Clark and colleagues from University College London and the University of Oxford, aimed to get a clearer picture of different fibroblast types in SSc skin and understand the...