Association Between Music Therapy Techniques and Patient-Reported Moderate to Severe Fatigue in Hospitalized Adults With Cancer.

Purpose: Cancer-related fatigue is a prevalent, debilitating symptom that contributes to increased health care utilization among hospitalized patients. Music therapy is a nonpharmacological intervention that uses active (eg, singing, selecting songs) and passive (eg, listening) techniques. Preliminary evidence from small trials suggests a potential benefit for cancer-related fatigue in the inpatient setting; however, it remains unclear which techniques are most effective.

Automated brightfield morphometry of 3D organoid populations by OrganoSeg.

Spheroid and organoid cultures are powerful in vitro models for biology, but size and shape diversity within the culture is largely ignored. To streamline morphometric profiling, we developed OrganoSeg, an open-source software that integrates segmentation, filtering, and analysis for archived brightfield images of 3D culture. OrganoSeg is more accurate and flexible than existing platforms, and we illustrate its potential by stratifying 5167 breast-cancer spheroid and 5743 colon and colorectal-cancer organoid morphologies.

Tumor-Suppressor Inactivation of GDF11 Occurs by Precursor Sequestration in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive and heterogeneous carcinoma in which various tumor-suppressor genes are lost by mutation, deletion, or silencing. Here we report a tumor-suppressive mode of action for growth-differentiation factor 11 (GDF11) and an unusual mechanism of its inactivation in TNBC. GDF11 promotes an epithelial, anti-invasive phenotype in 3D triple-negative cultures and intraductal xenografts by sustaining expression of E-cadherin and inhibitor of differentiation 2 (ID2).