Category: 4. Technology

Mumbai: Three children aged 12 to 16 died of disseminated tuberculosis (TB) at one of the major public hospitals in the city over the last month not due to lack of treatment but because private general practitioners failed to diagnose the disease early.Disseminated TB refers to the spread of the disease from the lungs to other organs. Sometimes, even chest physicians miss its signs in paediatric patients. For instance, a 15-year-old girl was sent to the hospital as a drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) patient without further evaluation. “All we were told was that she had a headache. As soon as she arrived, she collapsed and had to be put on a ventilator. She was severely neurologically impaired with meningitis,” said a doctor from the hospital’s paediatric department.The girl’s parents told the hospital that she had been vomiting for the past month: a classic telltale sign of disseminated TB. The hospital sees a few such cases every month. “Such patients visit general physicians first who fail to refer them to specialists till it is very late. That is what happened to the three who died,” the doctor said.The head of the hospital’s paediatric department said DR-TB remains a serious issue in children. “We are seeing every type of TB in children: abdominal, pulmonary, bone, brain, intestine, skin. Most of these patients rush in too late and in terrible distress, sometimes unconscious, with convulsions that cannot be controlled, and they all turn out to be TB patients.”Paediatric TB cases in Mumbai account for about 7-9% of all TB cases, according to data from BMC’s health department. The city reports around 60,000 TB cases annually. There is a considerable delay in seeking treatment for TB in the first place, and stigma as well as limited access play a role in this.Ganesh Acharya, a city-based TB-HIV activist, said, “A delay of two to three months in the treatment of children with TB is common. Families visit multiple general doctors who diagnose them with cough and cold, and in the end, it becomes a case of disseminated TB.”For children aged 12-16, delayed diagnosis is far more common as parents often stop consulting paediatricians and instead take them to general practitioners. A former paediatrician at Sion Hospital who routinely treated TB patients said, “There are complex reasons as to why general practitioners are unable to diagnose TB patients; one is that the manifestation of TB in children is very different than that in adults.“In children, it can show up as pleural effusion (fluid in chest) or severe bronchitis, said the doctor. “There’s a wide range of symptoms. That’s why general practitioners often don’t recognise it as TB.”Dr Tanu Singhal, paediatric consultant at Kokilaben Hospital, said, “TB is common even among well-off families. General practitioners may miss or sometimes misdiagnose it, but these families often go to specialists early themselves if the child doesn’t improve.”

Nintendo of Canada has announced that the pricing of the Switch, its accessories, its games and even Amiibo figures, will all be changing in Canada come August. The pricing adjustment is being made “based on market conditions,” according to the the announcement.

It’s not clear how much the price of the Switch family of products will be changing — Nintendo said new prices will be posted on its Canadian website on August 1 — but presumably they’ll be going up. The company currently sells the Switch for CA$400, the Switch OLED for CA$450 and the Switch Lite for CA$269 in Canada. Meanwhile, the Switch 2 launched for CA$630 in June.

The market conditions Nintendo is responding to could be the result of the suite of tariffs the US government applied to nearly all of its trade partners in April 2025. When the Switch 2 debuted at $450 in the US, many people assumed the new cost of doing business in North America was being factored in. That the price of the Switch is changing before the Switch 2 could be a confirmation of that fact.

While not an intentional ploy to get customers to spend more, if the Switch inches closer to the Switch 2 in price, there’s plenty of good reasons to buy the newer console over the older one in August. In many ways, the Switch 2 is just a nicer Switch.

11 Bit Studios has drawn the ire of players for the undisclosed use of artificial intelligence in its recent release, The Alters. The new project from the team behind Frostpunk and This War of Mine is a narratively and thematically interesting take on a science fiction survival game. The project contains a lot of dialogue and written text, and some players in-game copy that appeared to be generated by a large language model. The Steam storefront that games disclose when they contain material that is either pre-generated or live-generated by artificial intelligence, and The Alters had not been tagged as including AI content. The studio has issued a lengthy statement in response to the complaints.

One instance involved AI-generated text in a graphic asset. 11 Bit Studios said this asset was only meant to be used as a placeholder during development. “This was never intended to be part of the final release,” the company said. “Unfortunately, due to an internal oversight, this single placeholder text was mistakenly left in the game. We have since conducted a thorough review and confirmed that this was an isolated case, and the asset in question is being updated.”

The other AI use that players uncovered was in some cases of translations. According to 11 Bit Studios, AI was used for subtitle translations on the licensed movies that can be played in social area of the in-game base, which it said were made by an external source without creative input from its team:

AI is an increasingly delicate subject for creative professionals. Many companies with large language models have either been accused of or admitted to training on copyrighted content, which has made AI an ethical nonstarter for many artists and many players. But when studios are regularly faced with negative working conditions surrounding crunch, it’s also understandable why the gaming industry might be inclined to look for ways to speed up the process of shipping a title. The reactions to AI appearing The Alters is likely just the latest in the ongoing conversations about when and how this tech might be a part of game development.

Most of us have clicked on a bit.ly or t.co link without a second thought, and these links are practically everywhere. These are known as link-shorteners, or URL-shorteners, and these services are baked into social platforms, email tools, and even print ads. Plenty of people use these for all kinds of things, but why use a publicly-hosted URL shortener when you can host your own instead?

Here’s the thing with URL shorteners: they collect a lot of data, and that data goes to the companies that you use to make those URLs. If you self-host both the domain and the database yourself, you decide how long links live, how data is stored, and how each redirect behaves. This has a few benefits, and these benefits are ones that a public shortener can’t match.

Link longevity

Plus, you own the data

One of the biggest benefits of self-hosting a link shortener is the complete control that you have over it. Back in 2018, Google announced the deprecation of its own shortening service, called “goo.gl”, and eventually shut it down completely in the summer of 2024. That meant any URLs on the service were permanently dead, and anything that used a hardcoded goo.gl link would no longer work. While developers had years to make their move and get off the service, that’s not quite the point. The lack of control is the issue, and self-hosting your own service means that you don’t ever have to worry about that.

What’s even better is the complete control. If you shut down your link shortener, you know it’s truly gone. There’s no worry that the links are still in some database somewhere, and it means that when they’re gone, they’re actually gone.

Flexibility and rule-based redirects

Passwords, expiry dates, and more

Depending on the URL shortener that you use, you can do a lot of fun things with it. Most URL shorteners will allow you to replace the URL if it breaks while maintaining the same link, while others will allow you to do a whole lot more, too. I’m using Snapp, which is a fairly basic shortener, but it allows for link expiration, setting a secret password for accessing the shortened URL, and a maximum number of uses can be set before it expires. And that’s for a basic self-hosted shortener. Tools like Shlink will offer a lot more.

There are many options to choose from, and others you could try out include YOURLS, Polr, and Kutt. Snapp took mere minutes to set up and deploy, but the other options are all worth looking at, too.

Recognition and a personal touch

Your own URL is better than a generic bit.ly

If you’re hosting a URL shortener on your own server with your own domain, then you can have a personal touch with every URL that you share with others. You don’t need to rely on generic bit.ly addresses; you can have it be what you want, when you want, and that’s great for both businesses and for individuals who just want to have a bit of personality in their shortened URLs.

Many tools also offer native QR-code creation, and Snapp does too. That means you can create a custom short URL for something else, put it in a QR code, then share that QR code with others. Other services that offer a similar QR code creation ability for a URL will have built-in tracking and may even have a limited time that the QR code is active for which can only be unlocked by paying money, so not only does it add a personal touch, but it can be cheaper, too.

Better analytics

Many URL shorteners give you more data

If you want to see who’s clicking your link and from where, that’s another place where a self-hosted link shortener can come in handy. You can use the links as part of a marketing campaign, or simply share them on social media and then see where people are clicking the link from. It gives you additional statistics, and many self-hosted services give you the option of deciding what data is collected and how. For example, Snapp by default just shows geolocation data and doesn’t have many other tracking options.

Of course, if you’re using something like Cloudflare Proxy to route traffic to your self-hosted URL shortener, then much of this data will be abstracted. A proxy works both ways; your URL shortener will only see the IPs from Cloudflare’s CDN, though your IP address isn’t exposed either. Snapp may not have it all, but comparable tools like Shlink and YOURLS do.

A URL shortener can be a powerful tool

While you may not necessarily have a need for a URL shortener, they can be extremely useful to some people. Generating a QR code that can point to a site of your choosing can be great, and I’ve used it for things like QR codes that point to a Discord invite when I’ve run events in the past. You could also use it for your own self-hosted services if you didn’t want to create a lot of A records for individual services, though this would require a lot more setup with your reverse proxy to only accept traffic from the correct referrer. Still, it’s worth playing around with, especially if you have ideas of how it could be useful to you!

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I use as many ad-blocking programs as possible, but no matter how many I install, real-life advertising is still there, grabbing my attention when I’m just trying to go for a walk. Thankfully, there may be a solution on the horizon. Software engineer Stijn Spanhove recently posted a concept video showing what real-time, real-life ad-blocking looks like on a pair of Snap Spectacles, and I really want it. Check it out:

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The idea is that the AI in your smart glasses recognizes advertisements in your visual field and “edits them out’ in real time, sparing you from ever seeing what they want you to see.

While Spanhove’s video shows a red block over the offending ads, you could conceivably cover that Wendy’s ad with anything you want—an abstract painting, a photo of your family, an ad for Arby’s, etc.

How close are we to real-life ad-blocking?

While it’s a test at present, real-life ad-blocking for the people doesn’t seem far off. The technology is there now: current-generation consumer AI glasses like Meta Ray Bans can already identify what you’re looking at with scary accuracy.

Replacing ads is a little trickier, though. While there are AR smart-glasses on the market, like the XReal Airs, and upcoming Snap Specs, and AR experiences in VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3 can already strip out parts of the real environment and replace them, there isn’t anything on the market with full AR that is practical enough for wearing all the time. Battery life and weight are the problems, but those are solvable. There are so many companies competing for the smart glasses market, it seems like only a matter of time until it’s practical to achieve real life ad-blocking.

Companies versus consumer and the creation of the ultimate echo chamber

I could see this being a killer app for smart glasses in the near future: It’s the kind of things that consumers would really want. But it’s also the kind of thing that advertisers and marketers would really not want, and this might be the biggest obstacles to real-life ad-blockers. You could envision a “cat-and-mouse” game similar to the one that’s been playing out online for years, with companies trying ingenious ways to thwart the ad-blocking glasses, like disguising ads as something else. Would there be legal challenges? Would there be issues with a mega corporation that releases smart glasses not wanting to piss off every other company? And what happens if you want to edit out ads for the very device you’re wearing?

There are sociological concerns as well. People probably wouldn’t stop at replacing ads with pixel art. They’d be editing out anything that personally annoys them: homeless people, construction sites, other humans who have traits they don’t like. Curating your own visual experience in the real world could lead to the creation of personal echo chambers that make the world look more to your liking, but less like it is, the ultimate echo chamber.

Ethical concerns aside, I would be first in line for a pair of glasses that edited reality to my liking. I know I would use them responsibly, even if I’m not sure about everyone else. Maybe I wouldn’t wear them all the time. Just almost all the time.

As part of the “Treasure Tail: Zoshigaya” quest in Persona 5: The Phantom X, you’ll need to help the Orange Tabby Cat find their Orange Tabby Treasures around Zoshigaya. After the first time you interact with the Finding each Orange Tabby Treasure can be fairly difficult as they aren’t marked on the map and a few of them require a couple extra steps. However, once you do, you’ll receive valuable rewards and another treasure hunt.

Here’s where to find every Orange Tabby Treasure in Zoshigaya in Persona 5: The Phantom X.

All Orange Tabby Treasure locations in Zoshigaya

To complete the “Treasure Tail” side quest, you’ll need to find seven Orange Tabby Treasures. Luckily, you’ll get the first one in a cutscene immediately after you start the quest, so you only need to find six more. To help you in your search, we’ve made a map of Zoshigaya that is marked with the location of each treasure.

Additionally, you can find a more detailed description of each location in the sections below.

Orange Tabby Treasure #1 — In blue bucket behind man on phone

The first Orange Tabby Treasure can be found almost immediately after you start the Treasure Tail side quest. When facing the Orange Tabby Cat, turn around to spot a person on their phone and look behind them to find the first treasure inside of a blue bucket.

Orange Tabby Treasure #2 — On top of condenser unit

The second Orange Tabby Treasure can be found near the station on top of a condenser unit, which is an outdoor AC unit.

Orange Tabby Treasure #3 — In blue garbage bin

The third Orange Tabby Treasure can be found in a blue garbage bin inside a fenced bike parking area. As you cannot enter the fenced area, walk up to the fence to interact with the treasure.

Orange Tabby Treasure #4 — Beside bushes near home

The fourth Orange Tabby Treasure is right beside your own home. Interact with the bush beside the two people talking to retrieve it.

Orange Tabby Treasure #5 — Flower pot in alleyway

The fifth Orange Tabby Treasure is found inside a flower pot in an alleyway across the street from the capsule machines. To get this treasure, you’ll need to visit the Flower Shop in the Shibuya Underground Mall and purchase the Extra-Strength Nutrients.

Once you have the nutrients, return to the flower pot and interact with it to get the treasure.

Orange Tabby Treasure #6 — Under table

The sixth Orange Tabby Treasure is located under the table at the northern end of the map.

Treasure Tail Zoshigaya rewards

Now that you have all of the treasure, return to the the Orange Tabby Cat and complete the quest to receive the following rewards:

Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.

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June has passed me by in a haze of air travel, mild illness, protests and Pride, and it’s now officially time to close the book on Summer Game Fest 2025. around this year’s show and they’re all worth a read, but before moving on for good, I wanted to highlight a final batch of games that I can’t stop thinking about. This week, I present three mini previews straight out of SGF 2025 — and only two of them are horror games, which is a stupendous display of growth on my part.

Crisol: Theater of Idols

Crisol: Theater of Idols wasn’t on my radar until I sat down and played it at the Blumhouse booth, but now it’s pinging loud and clear, as if the booms were emanating directly from the blood-soaked bowels of Hell. It’s a first-person survival-horror action game set in a demented version of Spain that’s filled with monsters of modern folklore. Murderous marionettes and giant, ornately adorned skeletons hunt you through dark streets and towering gothic buildings, lamplight glinting off of every gross 3D detail. The whole demo felt like getting lost in a terrifying, nightmarish carnival, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

In Crisol, blood is your source of ammunition, and you drain the corpses of humans and chickens to refuel your health bar as well as your guns. Crisol is tense and gorgeous, reminiscent of Dishonored or Resident Evil Village, and enemies are both robust and tricky to evade. Crisol is the debut game from independent Spanish team Vermila Studios, which received an for the project in 2020. It’s being published by Blumhouse and is due out this year on , PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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Grave Seasons

There’s something deeply wrong in Ashenridge, the idyllic rural village where Grave Seasons is set. At first glance, Grave Seasons is a cute, narrative-based farming sim with detailed pixel art, juicy romance options and layers of home-maintenance mechanics. You spend time planting, watering, harvesting, crafting items, picking up trash and chatting with villagers — and then you dig up a severed hand. Pilar, your flirty neighbor who runs the tailor shop down the road, says something ominous about the fate of your house’s previous owner. The vibe shifts; the shadows start to look sinister. Night falls and the real horror is unleashed, sudden, violent and all the more shocking in such a peaceful setting. A supernatural serial killer is on the loose in Ashenridge and, in between planting crops, it’s up to you to investigate (and maybe date) the murderer.

Grave Seasons is a game that will live or die by its tone, and so far, developer Perfect Garbage has absolutely nailed the vibe of nefarious, creeping dread. Ashenridge is a beautiful little town with tons of people to meet and activities to complete, and the character avatars are sexy, sweet and super intriguing. A paranormal murder investigation is simply the cherry on top of a competent farming and dating sim, and I’m eager to take a bite out of the full game. At SGF 2025, developers said the complete Grave Seasons experience should take about 20 hours. Grave Seasons is being published by Blumhouse, and it’s scheduled to hit and consoles in 2026.

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Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School

Escape Academy is of the past five years and I am inordinately stoked for the sequel, which turns the school into an open world of puzzles, riddles and cringey puns. With Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, developer Coin Crew is going all-in on the student roleplaying vibe, and the entire campus is littered with mysteries. It’s also playable as a split-screen, couch co-op experience, which is one of the series’ greatest strengths. Frantically screaming solutions at your friend just feels better in person than over a Discord call, you know?

I played the original Escape Academy with a local partner, so that’s how I tried out the sequel at SGF 2025. I dragged Engadget EIC Aaron Souppouris to the iam8bit booth and we dove in, starting in a classroom covered in sneaky environmental clues. In Escape Academy 2, the assignment is simple — get out — but the execution is complex, and we were soon throwing out names, dates and math problems, trying to solve a series of tricky, interconnected puzzles and leave the room. After getting just one hint from the developers, we made our way to the hallway, which was lined with locker-based riddles, and eventually reached the headmaster’s office, which was a contained playground of puzzle gaming. We had to use a pen and piece of paper to keep track of a few sections, and overall, our interactions felt fresh. Coin Crew isn’t just rolling out the same problems with different solutions for the sequel, and the new riddles were clever, innovative and super satisfying. (The same can’t be said about all of the puns, but that’s part of the charm.)

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School features both local and online co-op, so you’ll be free to yell at your friends in whichever format you prefer. Coin Crew is still working on the game and there’s no release date yet, but it’s available now to .

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The news

The only thing worse than not disclosing AI use in the creation of a video game is not disclosing it and then deploying it so sloppily that players immediately notice. Indie developer and publisher 11 Bit Studios learned this lesson firsthand with The Alters, a futuristic base-building game starring an astronaut and his alternate-reality clones. Within a week of the game’s release on June 13, posts started and showing AI-generated text in the game, across multiple languages. On June 30, 11 Bit released a statement confirming its use of AI in developing The Alters, saying it was utilized only in background text and to help with last-minute localization efforts. “No matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know,” the studio wrote.

I’d really love to stop writing headlines like this. Microsoft is preparing to lay off a large number of Xbox employees this week, as part of a planned 3 percent reduction in staff across the company. That’s a loss of roughly 7,000 jobs in total, and according to , Xbox leaders are expecting “substantial cuts across the entire group.” The firings follow a round of at Xbox in January 2024, another , and last year’s of Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games and Tango Gameworks (the latter of which lives on under Krafton). Meanwhile, Microsoft reported a net revenue of $25.8 billion in the first three months of 2025, with an 8 percent yearly increase in revenue from Xbox content and services. Congrats?

Netflix started beefing up its video games division around 2021, with the Night School and the rollout of an in-app gaming library offering popular mobile titles at no extra charge to subscribers. Netflix currently supports more than 100 games, including Death’s Door, Hades, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Braid Anniversary Edition, Katana ZERO and the Monument Valley series — but these are disappearing in July. A total of 22 games will be deleted from Netflix at various times in July, and the culling follows similar cutbacks in the company’s interactive division, including the recent closure of an .

Because we know you’re going to get something — what are you picking up at the Steam Summer Sale this year? Share your spoils in the comments! If you’re overwhelmed, allow me to humbly suggest , , or .

On a related note, don’t forget to check out (the nearly complete) Playdate Season 2.

… but it’s definitely not any more. Resident Evil: Requiem producer Masachika Kawata and director Koshi Nakanishi clarified that their new game is an offline single-player experience, but they said that early in development, the team seriously considered making it online and open-world. This experimentation fueled rumors about Requiem introducing a new direction for the Resident Evil franchise, but it turns out the final product will be a with the ability to swap between first- and third-person views. Spooooky.

Newswise — In a new study published in Nature, researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center explore a surprising phenomenon in which high doses of radiation cause growth in existing metastatic tumors that weren’t directly treated with radiation.

Scientists previously observed that radiation can cause distant tumors to shrink after radiation, known as the “abscopal effect.” The UChicago researchers therefore dubbed the new, opposite response the “badscopal effect,” as a play on words for when unrelated metastatic tumors grow after radiation. They believe this unexpected response happens because high dose radiation increases the production of a protein called amphiregulin by tumor cells that are directly treated with radiation. High amounts of amphiregulin weaken the immune system’s ability to fight cancer and make cancer cells better at protecting themselves. The findings point to promising new therapeutic strategies that could lead to more effective treatments for metastatic cancer.

Radiotherapy: a double-edged sword?

Radiotherapy is often used alone or in combination with surgery and chemotherapy to control localized tumors. More recently, radiotherapy has been used to treat cancers that have limited spread, termed “oligometastasis.” Scientists believe that radiotherapy activates the immune system, producing regression in tumors at distant sites that are not directly treated with radiation (i.e. the abscopal effect). However, many patients who receive radiation for oligometastasis or as part of an immunotherapy regimen fail to respond to treatment because of the progression of distant metastasis.

“Our lab postulated that high doses of radiation might actually promote tumor growth at unirradiated sites under certain conditions, potentially accounting for some of these failures,” said senior author Ralph Weichselbaum, MD, Chair and Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology at UChicago Medicine.

Uncovering the ‘badscopal’ effect

“Studies from the 1940s suggested radiation might cause tumor spread, but that never made sense to me because radiation is a highly effective anti-cancer agent within the tumor bed,” Weichselbaum said. “However, the communication between the irradiated site and distant metastatic sites is fascinating.”

To investigate this tumor-to-tumor interaction, the research team analyzed biopsy samples from a clinical trial in which patients with diverse histological types that were treated with high dose focused radiotherapy known as Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy (SBRT) and checkpoint blockade (Pembrolizumab). That clinical trial team, led by Steven Chmura, MD, PhD, Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology and Director of Clinical and Translational Research for Radiation Oncology at UChicago, found that tumors at preexisting metastatic sites increased in size following SBRT, suggesting radiation might promote tumor growth.

To understand how radiation at the primary site affects distant tumors, researchers led by András Piffkó, MD, a post-doctoral fellow in the Weichselbaum lab, conducted gene expression profiling of patient tumors before and after radiation treatment. They discovered that in tumors that had been treated with radiation, the gene encoding for a protein called amphiregulin was significantly increased.

Amphiregulin binds to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a widely expressed transmembrane tyrosine kinase, and activates major intracellular signaling pathways governing cell survival, proliferation, migration and cell death.

The researchers then studied this effect using animal models of lung and breast cancer. They found that while radiation reduced the number of new metastatic sites, it increased the growth of existing metastases. Radiotherapy significantly upregulated amphiregulin in tumor cells and blood. Blocking amphiregulin with antibodies or eliminating its gene in the tumor cells using the gene editing technology CRISPR reduced the size of tumors outside of the radiation field.

“Interestingly, the combination of radiation and amphiregulin blockade decreased both tumor size and the number of metastatic sites,” Weichselbaum said.

The role of immune suppression

To explore the mechanism further, the researchers analyzed blood samples from a second clinical trial conducted by Chmura, in which lung cancer patients received SBRT either following or at the same time as immunotherapy. They found that failure to decrease amphiregulin following SBRT in the serum of patients was associated with an adverse outcome. Additionally, they found an increase in myeloid cells with immunosuppressive characteristics was associated with metastasis progression and death.

In a previous study published in Cancer Cell, Weichselbaum and team demonstrated that ablating immunosuppressive myeloid cells reduces both the size and frequency of metastasis in animal models. By contrast, in the current study, they saw an increase in immunosuppressive myeloid cells in animals where amphiregulin was highly expressed in tumors and blood following radiation but not in tumors that did not express amphiregulin. Amphiregulin appeared to block the differentiation of myeloid cells, leading to an immunosuppressive phenotype.

In collaboration with Ronald Rock, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at UChicago, the team discovered that amphiregulin and radiation upregulated CD47, a so-called “don’t eat me” signal on tumor cells that blocks the ability of macrophages and myeloid cells to engulf tumor cells.

Blocking amphiregulin and CD47 in combination with radiotherapy resulted in highly effective metastatic control in animal models. The study results indicate a paradigm shift for the use of radiation therapy in patients with locally advanced and metastatic tumors, in which molecules upregulated by radiotherapy could be detected and neutralized. This in turn could lead to a new type of personalized radiotherapy, especially in patients with metastatic disease.

“These results open a whole new way of thinking about the systemic effects of radiotherapy,” Weichselbaum said. “Based on these findings, we are planning to conduct a clinical trial to further explore and validate the results.”

The study, “Radiation-induced amphiregulin drives tumor metastasis,” was supported by the National Cancer Institute, Ludwig Foundation, the Chicago Tumor Institute, generous gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Foglia and the Foglia Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. David Kozin and Mr. and Mrs. James Weichselbaum.

Additional authors include András Piffkó from the University of Chicago, USA, and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany; Kaiting Yang from the University of Chicago, the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research, and South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, P.R. China; Arpit Panda, Janna Heide, Katarzyna Zawieracz, Leonhard Donle, Ernst Lengyel, Ronald Rock, and Everett E. Vokes from the University of Chicago; Krystyna Tesak, Jason Bugno, Chuangyu Wen, Emile Naccasha, Dapeng Chen, Steven Chmura, Sean Pitroda, and Hua Laura Liang from the University of Chicago, and the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research, Chicago; Chuan He from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago; Liangliang Wang from the University of Chicago, the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research, Chicago, and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China; Yanbin Fu from the University of Chicago and Weill Cornell Medicine, New York; Douglas Tilley from Temple University, Philadelphia; and Matthias Mack from the University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany.