Perhaps it’s unsurprising to read that there are health benefits to exercise (in mice). Humans with pancreatic cancer were already known to fare better if they maintained an exercise regiment than those who didn’t, but research published in Cancer Cell this June was the first to identify at least one of the underlying biological mechanisms. In the study, scientists found that mice who ran on appropriately adorable, miniaturized treadmills for 30 minutes per day had higher levels of interleukin-15, a cytokine typically released during exercise. The cytokine then mobilized a subset of cancer-killing immune cells, which were better able to infiltrate and destroy the tumor. In a preliminary human analysis, the scientists found that tissue samples taken from human pancreatic cancer patients who participated in an exercise program contained a higher number of those immune cells than did non-exercising controls. With this mechanism in hand, the authors of the study ...
Our Favorite Cancer Stories of 2022
This year, cancer researchers uncovered a variety of ways that tumors can survive and spread, ranging from damaging their own DNA to exploiting the nearby microenvironment for nutrients.
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Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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