Highjacking tumours, quantum thermometry & LLM strategic thinking
Your new Strategy Toolkit newsletter (May 27, 2026)
(1) My way or the highway
More than twenty years ago, researchers at Genentech including Napoleone Ferrara took the world by storm through the discovery and commercialisation of anti-VEGF medicines like Avastin. These medicines disrupted the blood flow to cancer tumours.
Now, researchers at Yale have uncovered a potential new vulnerability of cancer tumours, related to the nerves from the peripheral nervous system.
“In many tumors, nerves from our peripheral nervous system establish themselves in the cancerous tissue. The new study* found that tumors can hijack these nerves to send signals to the brain. This, in turn, triggers activity that blocks immune cells from infiltrating the cancer, which enables cancer growth.
“Tumors are really smart,” says Chuyue Yu, a PhD student at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and one of the study’s first authors. “They employ as many resources in the body they can get in touch with to promote their own growth.”
“Principal investigator Rui Chang, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience and of cellular and molecular physiology at YSM, previously thought that the innervation of tumors could be bad for the cancer. He hypothesized that the nerves would detect them as invaders and send warning signals to the brain to remove the threat.
“But to his surprise, his new study, done in collaboration with a team led by Chengcheng Jin, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, revealed that disrupting sensory neurons in tumors caused them to shrink.”**
