UNO Researchers Join Global Effort to Catch Cancer’s Deadliest Secret in Motion

🧬 What’s new: A team of international researchers, including scientists from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), has made a breakthrough discovery about how cancer spreads and becomes deadly.

• The study, recently accepted by Nature Medicine, identifies macrovascular infiltration — the invasion of large blood vessels by cancer cells — as a major, previously overlooked driver of cancer mortality. This discovery could redefine how cancers are staged and open new avenues for treatment and survival prediction.
• The research team includes collaborators from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, ETH Zurich, and multiple European institutions.
• The study included 31 patients enrolled prospectively at UT Southwestern and a retrospective, validation cohort of 1,250 patients (from German institutions). The data analysis for the whole study was carried out at the University of Nebraska at Omaha by Kirk Gasper, Ph.D. under the supervision of Dario Ghersi, M.D., Ph.D.

💡 Why it matters:

• Despite major advances in cancer treatment, the precise reasons patients die from the disease have remained unclear.
• By identifying macrovascular invasion as a key factor in cancer progression, researchers have unveiled a biological process that could reshape how clinicians assess risk and design interventions.
• The findings have the potential to inform new therapeutic strategies, improve staging systems, and enhance patient outcomes.

🎤 What they’re saying:

• Dario Ghersi, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor, UNO: “This work shows the power of collaboration between computation and clinical science. "Our expertise in complex data analysis played an important role in linking computational findings with biological and clinical observations, contributing to a discovery that could change how we view cancer."
• Matteo Ligorio, M.D., Ph.D.: “The big question we were trying to answer: What kills cancer patients? Why do they die one specific day rather than six months earlier or later?”

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R37CA242070. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.