Overview
- Tobias Janowitz of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory leads a project to develop therapies that restore appetite in people with cancer cachexia.
- Teams are investigating immune signaling, with interleukin‑6 flagged as a candidate pathway that may relay signals to the brain and drive apathy and reduced food intake.
- The work is preclinical and exploratory, with no approved treatment yet, and aims to improve quality of life and patients’ ability to tolerate cancer therapy.
- Cachexia affects up to 80% of people with advanced cancer and is estimated to be the primary cause of death for roughly 20–30% of cancer patients.
- The effort, funded in 2022 through Cancer Research UK’s Cancer Grand Challenge, is framed as the opposite of GLP‑1 weight‑loss injections such as Ozempic and Mounjaro.