by Wendy Plump

A revolutionary treatment called checkpoint blockade immunotherapy has proven both remarkable and bewildering in the fight against cancer: remarkable because some patients respond to it with great success, bewildering because others receive little benefit.

Part of the reason involves whether the patient’s cancer has enough mutations to activate the immune system. But many other patients fail to respond for unknown reasons.

Now, a team of researchers in the Rabinowitz Lab has put forward an explanation and a possible end-run around the factors that limit the treatment’s success through a process called metabolic supplementation.

They discovered that methanol—a substance that in large quantities can be toxic to human beings—shows great efficacy among mice in bolstering immunotherapy to treat and even cure certain cancers.