Giving tumour-bearing mice specific proteins prevents a muscle-wasting syndrome that commonly affects people with cancer.

Many patients with cancer die from severe muscle loss (cachexia), which has no treatment. To find a way to halt the condition, Amelia Johnston and Nicholas Hoogenraad at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and their colleagues injected mice with mouse cancer cells that had been engineered to express a human gene encoding the protein Fn14, which drives cancer growth. The animals lost muscle and fat, but giving the mice an antibody against Fn14 stopped cachexia. Moreover, in a mouse model of cachexia, the animals lived longer and maintained body weight when treated with an anti-Fn14 antibody, compared with untreated mice.

Targeting Fn14 proteins that are generated by tumours could be a treatment strategy for this condition, the authors say.

Cell 162, 1365–1378 (2015)