KAIST team develops RNA therapy to block cancer cachexia via brain pathway

For generations, cancer's cruelest companion has been cachexia — a wasting that steals the body from within, indifferent to how much a patient eats or fights. Researchers at KAIST in South Korea have now traced this destruction to a precise signal in the brainstem, where a protein released by tumors instructs the body to consume itself, and they have developed an RNA-based therapy to silence that instruction at its source. In mice with advanced cachexia, the treatment raised survival from 20 to 90 percent — a result that places human clinical trials on the horizon by 2030, and with them, the p