Daily briefing: Tumours use neurons as hotline to the brain

"Tumours lure and then hijack nearby sensory neurons to boost their own growth. The cancer cells use these neurons to send a signal to the brain that subdues the activity of immune cells around the tumour, which allows it to grow unchecked. When researchers deactivated these neurons in mice with lung cancer, they saw "a huge, dramatic reduction" in tumour growth - more than 50% - says cancer immunologist and study co-author Chengcheng Jin."

"Snakes don't have genes to make the 'hunger hormone' ghrelin, which could explain how they can go for months between meals. In most other vertebrates, ghrelin stimulates the appetite, and plays a role in breaking down fat to use as energy. Researchers found that other reptiles such as chameleons also lack ghrelin genes, which might help these animals preserve their fat stores for longer without needing to eat."

"An open-source artificial intelligence model called OpenScholar can outperform some major large language models (LLMs) at reviewing scientific literature, and gets the citations correct more often. OpenScholar combines an LLM with a database of 45 million open-access articles and links the information it sources directly back to the literature to stop the system from 'hallucinating' citations. The model is limited by the scope of its database, say the team who developed it."

Tumours hijack nearby sensory neurons to send signals to the brain that subdue immune-cell activity around the tumour, allowing unchecked growth. Deactivating these neurons in mice with lung cancer reduced tumour growth by more than 50%. Snakes and some other reptiles lack genes for the hunger hormone ghrelin, which could explain extended fasting ability and preservation of fat stores and provides a model to study ghrelin's functions. OpenScholar, an open-source AI, pairs an LLM with a database of 45 million open-access articles and links sourced information directly to literature to reduce citation hallucinations; its performance is limited by database scope but it is cheaper to run.

Read at Nature