The mutation that drives this eye cancer also betrays it: scientists find its lifeline — and cut it

Uveal melanoma is the most common eye cancer in adults, and once it spreads, survival has barely improved in decades — there has been no weakness to aim a drug at. Gui-Ming Zhang, Le Yu and colleagues at Southern Medical University in China tried a different hunt: they ran genome-wide CRISPR screens — switching genes off one by one — on cell pairs that differed only in the GNAQ mutation that drives this cancer, looking for a gene the mutant cells need and healthy ones do not. The top hit was EP300, which makes a protein called p300: it helps switch on the YAP growth programme these tumours live by. Removing p300, or blocking it with drugs, profoundly slowed tumour growth and spread in several animal models, including disease that had already spread. The work is published in Nature Communications. It is early, lab-stage science — but for patients whose cancer carries this mutation, it is the first clear map of where the tumour is vulnerable.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation