The KI's Vander Heiden Lab, in collaboration with researchers and clinicians at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is exploring the connections between pancreatic cancer and weight loss. As seen in Nature, the team looked at tissue wasting mechanisms in mice with early stage tumors and found that loss of pancreatic digestive enzymes can contribute to early weight loss in pancreatic cancer. They also examined blood samples and clinical data from more than 700 pancreatic cancer patients, determining that tissue loss does not necessarily correlate with lower survival rates and suggesting that detecting such tissue loss could lead to earlier diagnosis. The work was supported in part by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund and the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine. Get the breakdown from MIT News, Nature News & Views, and STAT.