Rather than replacing current treatments, the strategy is designed to help them work better. In preclinical experiments, suppressing SET prevented tumors from developing.

A Potential Weakness in Glioblastoma

Among the proteins examined, SET stood out because blocking it had such a strong effect on tumor formation. The researchers also found that interfering with related proteins increased the sensitivity of glioblastoma cells to radiation.

Together, the findings point to a biological pathway that may eventually be targeted with drugs to weaken the cancer’s defenses.

The OSUCCC – James team focused on PP2A, an enzyme involved in regulating signals that cancer cells use to grow, survive, and recover from treatment-related damage. Glioblastoma cells appear to interfere with PP2A using three proteins called ANP32A, CIP2A and SET. When the researchers blocked those proteins in laboratory and animal models, fewer cancer cells survived, and the remaining cells became more vulnerable to radiation.

“Glioblastoma is hard to treat because it can adapt and survive,” said Arnab Chakravarti, MD, chair of radiation oncology at the OSUCCC – James. “Our findings suggest that restoring PP2A activity may make glioblastoma cells less able to survive treatment. That gives us a clear path to test whether this approach can make radiation and chemotherapy more effective for patients with GBM.”

Testing Ways to Restore PP2A Activity

The results remain preliminary and have not yet been evaluated in patients. Researchers are now investigating whether SET or other proteins that suppress PP2A can be targeted safely and whether doing so improves the effectiveness of standard glioblastoma therapies.

The team also examined an FDA-approved antipsychotic drug that is capable of increasing PP2A activity. According to the researchers, the results provide additional reason to study medications that influence this pathway.

However, the drug is not ready to be used as a glioblastoma treatment and should not be taken for this purpose outside a clinical trial.

“This is an important first step,” said Chakravarti. “By understanding how SET and related PP2A blockers help GBM survive treatment, we can test ways to block that protection and make current therapies more effective.”

A First Step Toward New Treatment Strategies

The study was published in the May 2026 issue of Cancer Letters, and was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute and The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Two leading possibilities are hypothetical particles known as ultralight axions and dark photons. In the mass range examined by the researchers, these particles would be extraordinarily light, roughly 19 to 21 orders of magnitude lighter than an electron.

Turning Earth Into a Giant Dark Matter Detector

Many traditional axion experiments try to convert axions into photons by exposing them to extremely strong magnetic fields inside laboratories. The challenge is scale. Even powerful lab magnets can only cover a relatively small region.

Researchers from Kyoto University, Hiroshima University, and Nihon University saw a way around that limitation. Instead of relying only on laboratory equipment, they asked whether Earth’s own magnetic environment could be used as part of the experiment.

“We asked ourselves whether we could use the Earth itself as a giant detector in the search,” says corresponding author Atsushi Taruya. “The Earth-ionosphere cavity acts as a natural resonator that amplifies electromagnetic waves right around the mass range we wanted to probe.”

The region between Earth’s surface and the ionosphere can naturally resonate with electromagnetic waves, much like a large cavity. That made it especially useful for searching for signals associated with the ultralight particles the team wanted to investigate.

Expanding the Search to Higher Frequencies

One obstacle was that previous theory could only reliably describe frequencies below 1 Hz. That left much of the potentially useful frequency range unexplored.

To solve this problem, the researchers developed a new theoretical framework that includes the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere. Their calculations showed that the Earth-ionosphere cavity can amplify signals near 8 Hz and allowed them to make reliable predictions up to about 30 Hz.

The model also predicted an important difference between the two dark matter candidates. Signals produced by axions should vary depending on location, with the strongest expected in Southeast Asia. Dark photon signals, by contrast, should appear at nearly the same strength around the world.

A Decade of Magnetic Data Put to the Test

Using this framework, the team examined roughly 10 years of geomagnetic measurements collected between 2012 and 2022 by the British Geological Survey’s Eskdalemuir Observatory.

The researchers first removed artificial sources of noise from the data. They then looked for the kind of steady signal concentrated within a very narrow frequency range that dark matter is expected to produce over long periods of time. The results were then subjected to statistical analysis.

The same theoretical approach was also applied to dark photons. Unlike axions, dark photons can produce electromagnetic waves even when no magnetic field is present, so the researchers searched the dataset for the different signature those particles would be expected to create.

Stronger Limits and Mysterious Signal Candidates

By effectively using the entire Earth as a detector for a particular range of axion masses, the researchers placed new limits on how strongly axions could interact with light.

Those limits were about 100 times tighter than the previous best result from a ground-based experiment. They were also competitive with constraints inferred from astrophysical X-ray observations made by observatories such as Chandra and NuSTAR, although those astrophysical limits depend on certain theoretical assumptions.

The dark photon search produced an especially intriguing result. Researchers identified several signal candidates that could potentially have a dark matter origin. However, the source of those signals remains unknown, and they have not been confirmed as evidence of dark matter.

Dark matter’s true identity therefore remains unresolved. Still, the new theoretical framework could give researchers a powerful way to expand future searches and use Earth’s natural electromagnetic environment as a tool for probing some of the lightest possible forms of dark matter.

The finding suggests that cells can use their existing molecular machinery to handle synthetic genetic information. That marks an important step toward a long-standing goal in synthetic biology: expanding the language of DNA beyond the four letters found in nature. In the future, such systems could help scientists engineer biological machinery that carries out new functions or produces compounds that do not naturally exist.

How Cells Read an Eight-Letter Genetic Alphabet

The researchers focused on RNA polymerase, the enzyme that reads DNA and produces RNA — the first step in gene expression. To see how the enzyme handles synthetic genetic information, the team combined biochemical experiments with high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy capable of revealing structures at scales smaller than the width of a single atom.

The researchers captured detailed structural views of RNA polymerase from Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria as it recognized and incorporated two synthetic base pairs. These artificial genetic letters are not found in nature.

The images showed that RNA polymerase identifies the synthetic DNA letters using many of the same biochemical and structural signals it relies on to recognize natural base pairs. That finding helps explain why the enzyme can accurately copy information written using an expanded genetic alphabet.

In a related study published in PNAS, the same research team found that RNA polymerase can also recognize another pair of synthetic base pairs even though they lack the hydrogen bonds that normally help hold DNA base pairs together.

Synthetic DNA Could Enable New Technologies

The potential applications extend well beyond understanding how DNA works. Earlier research has already used expanded genetic alphabets to create synthetic DNA molecules capable of recognizing liver cancer cells.

By showing in molecular detail how RNA polymerase reads and transcribes non-natural DNA letters, the new research provides an important foundation for technologies built around expanded genetic codes. Possible applications include new diagnostic tools, therapeutics, and engineered biological systems with capabilities that do not occur naturally.

Two Studies Explore Expanded Genetic Codes

The Nature Communications study (“Structural Basis of Transcription of the Hachimoji Eight-Letter Alphabet by E. coli RNA Polymerase”), led by Dong Wang, PhD, professor at the UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, was published on Sept. 2, 2026 in Nature Communications.

The PNAS study (“Hydrophobic unnatural base pair promotes trigger loop closure and catalysis in cellular RNA polymerase independent of hydrogen bonding”), published on Aug. 12, 2026, was also led by Wang.