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By Nancy Lapid, Health Science Editor

Hello Health Rounds readers! Today we highlight new research showing the virus that causes mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, has mutated in ways that makes it more easily transmissible among humans. We also feature some promising potential advances based on early laboratory experiments. Researchers have developed a melanin-based skin cream that may speed wound healing and other skin damage. We also report on efforts to make cell therapies used to treat blood cancers more effective against solid tumors.

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In breaking news, see these stories from our Reuters journalists: Novo Nordisk, Lilly see insatiable demand for weight-loss drugs; e-cigarette use by US high school students falls in 2023; Wegovy may make you drink less, but brewers aren’t concerned; U.S. hospital groups sue to block ban on web trackers; Turkey ready to take cancer patients from shut Gaza hospital; and Brazil child cancer deaths linked to soy farming.

 Researchers hope a skin cream containing a supercharged synthetic version of the skin pigment melanin will help protect against burns from sun and radiation exposure. REUTERS/Stringer

The virus that causes mpox – formerly called monkeypox – is mutating and becoming more transmissible among humans, according to new research.

Until recently, mpox was considered a zoonotic disease, meaning it was transmitted from animals to humans. In May of 2022, however, human cases were found to be spreading internationally beyond countries known to harbor infected rodents.

When genes were sequenced from the virus that caused the first cases in 2022 and compared to genes from strains isolated from patients infected in 2018 from animal exposures, researchers found it had been mutating much faster than they had expected, according to a report published on Thursday in Science.

Most of the mutations, they found, were changes related to an antiviral enzyme in the human immune system. These changes signal “sustained human-to-human mpox transmission rather than repeated zoonotic spillover,” the researchers wrote.

Mpox infections in humans produce symptoms such as fever, intense headache, swollen lymph nodes, back pain and muscle aches, fatigue, and skin blisters.

Recent mpox virus samples show that sustained human-to-human transmission is still ongoing outside of the cases that were the focus of the 2022 global outbreak, the researchers said.

Many countries with large populations of infected rodents lack the public health surveillance tools needed to detect mpox infections in humans, they noted.

“Surveillance needs to be global if mpox virus is to be eliminated from the human population and then prevented from reemerging,” the researchers said.

Read more about mpox on Reuters.com

• China to manage monkeypox as disease on par with COVID-19
• United States to end mpox emergency declaration
• Mpox cases and deaths around the world

An experimental skin cream containing a synthetic form of melanin might someday be used to speed wound healing and prevent burns from environmental toxins, based on promising results of laboratory testing on mice and human skin samples.

The cream significantly decreased swelling, time to scab healing, and the rate at which the wounds from chemical burns and ultraviolet light exposure shrank, researchers reported on Thursday in npj Regenerative Medicine.

Melanin is a pigment in skin, eyes and hair. By scavenging toxic forms of oxygen produced by injured tissues, known as  oxygen free radicals, melanin protects skin cells from sun damage, environmental pollution, and automobile exhaust fumes.

The synthetic melanin, made of engineered nanoparticles, can scavenge more radicals per gram compared to human melanin, according to the researchers.

“It’s like super melanin,” study co-author Nathan Gianneschi of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a statement.

By soaking up the free radicals after an injury, the synthetic melanin quieted the destructive inflammation induced by the immune response of skin cells, allowing healing to begin, the researchers found.

They said they hope the synthetic melanin cream can someday be used as a sunscreen booster.

They are also studying its use as a treatment for skin burns from radiation exposure during cancer treatments, and as a dye for soldiers’ clothing that would absorb toxins in the environment, particularly nerve gas.

Immunotherapies used to treat blood cancers might also be made effective against solid tumors, laboratory studies suggest.

The treatments involve the use of “chimeric antigen receptor T cells”, more commonly known as CAR T therapy, or “T-cell receptor (TCR) T-cells,” both of which are immune cells that have been modified to have proteins on their surface engineered to attack cancer cells.

Although CAR T-cell therapy has been successful in treating blood cancers, it has not worked well for solid tumor cancers, researchers noted in a report published on Wednesday in Clinical Cancer Research.

TCR T cells have shown more promise but still lag behind other modern treatments in effectiveness against solid cancers.

To address that problem, researchers engineered CAR T cells and TCR T cells to carry additional proteins called cytokines to boost T-cell function. T cells are an important disease fighting component of the immune system.

In studies of mice with tumors, including cervical cancer and a brain malignancy called neuroblastoma, they found that the modified T cells carrying two cytokines – IL-15 and IL-21 – were effective and safe and worked better than those carrying either cytokine alone.

The researchers are continuing to test their modified T-cells carrying IL-15- and IL-21 in lab and animal studies of other solid tumors, with the goal of being able to start tests in humans in the next few years.

This newsletter was edited by Bill Berkrot.

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