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Received — 26 March 2026 ⏭

Low-dose intestinal irradiation enhances the efficacy and prognosis of PD-1 blockade in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer

✇Omics In Lung
By: Baiyang Huang · Jiarui Zhao · Jingyu Zhu · Xingpeng Wang · Min Li · Jing Xu · Kaiyue Wang · Xiaohan Wang · Weiqing Wang · Cong Bo · Jinquan Yao · Menglin Bai · Bo Cheng · Jinming Yu · Guoxin Cai · Xue Meng
18 March 2026 at 18:00

Clin Cancer Res. 2026 Mar 18. doi: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-25-4153. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Intestinal low-dose irradiation (ILDR) may enhance immunotherapy efficacy by modulating the gut microbiota and metabolism; however, its role in metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (mNSCLC), particularly in the first-line setting, remains unclear.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: This multicenter retrospective and prospective study included mNSCLC patients receiving first- and second-line programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitors along with abdominopelvic radiotherapy between 2018 and 2025. Patients were stratified by the mean intestinal radiation dose into <1 Gy, 1-3 Gy, and >3 Gy groups and treatment outcomes were compared. The blood and fecal samples were subjected to multi-omics profiling.

RESULTS: g>309 patients were included in the retrospective analysis. Optimal efficacy was observed with a small intestinal mean radiation dose (SIMRD) of 1-3 Gy, showing longer progression-free survival (PFS, 10.2 months) and overall survival (OS, 22.8 months) (P < 0.01), which was consistent across subgroups. Compared with 1-3 Gy, SIMRD >3 Gy (Hazard ratio [HR] = 4.87, P < 0.001) and <1 Gy (HR = 1.85, P < 0.001) independently predicted worse OS. Prospective results confirmed the best disease control rate (P = 0.041) and PFS (P = 0.046) with SIMRD of 1-3 Gy. Responders were enriched in Bacillota, Clostridia, and indole derivatives, particularly indole-3-carboxylic acid. Moreover, the 1-3 Gy group exhibited increased circulating macrophage inflammatory protein-3α and reduced circulating α4β7+ regulatory T cells.

CONCLUSIONS: ILDR influences the efficacy of PD-1 blockade in patients with mNSCLC, particularly when SIMRD is maintained within the 1-3 Gy range, likely through modulation of the gut microbiota-metabolite-immune axis.

PMID:41849236 | DOI:10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-25-4153

Received — 5 March 2026 ⏭

Contextual Drag: How Errors in the Context Affect LLM Reasoning

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Yun Cheng · Xingyu Zhu · Haoyu Zhao · Sanjeev Arora
4 March 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2602.04288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Central to many self-improvement pipelines for large language models (LLMs) is the assumption that models can improve by reflecting on past mistakes. We study a phenomenon termed contextual drag: the presence of failed attempts in the context biases subsequent generations toward structurally similar errors. Across evaluations of 11 proprietary and open-weight models on 8 reasoning tasks, contextual drag induces 10-20% performance drops, and iterative self-refinement in models with severe contextual drag can collapse into self-deterioration. Structural analysis using tree edit distance reveals that subsequent reasoning trajectories inherit structurally similar error patterns from the context. We demonstrate that neither external feedback nor successful self-verification suffices to eliminate this effect. While mitigation strategies such as fallback-behavior fine-tuning and context denoising yield partial improvements, they fail to fully restore baseline performance, positioning contextual drag as a persistent failure mode in current reasoning architectures.
Received — 25 February 2026 ⏭

MolReasoner: Toward Effective and Interpretable Reasoning for Molecular LLMs

✇cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
By: Guojiang Zhao · Zixiang Lu · Yutang Ge · Sihang Li · Zheng Cheng · Haitao Lin · Lirong Wu · Hanchen Xia · Hengxing Cai · Wentao Guo · Hongshuai Wang · Mingjun Xu · Siyu Zhu · Guolin Ke · Linfeng Zhang · Zhifeng Gao
24 February 2026 at 13:00
arXiv:2508.02066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across various domains, but their ability to perform molecular reasoning remains underexplored. Existing methods mostly rely on general-purpose prompting, which lacks domain-specific molecular semantics, or fine-tuning, which faces challenges in interpretability and reasoning depth, often leading to structural and textual hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce MolReasoner, a two-stage framework that transitions LLMs from memorization to high-fidelity chemical reasoning. In the Mol-SFT stage, knowledge-enhanced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data provides a strong foundation, while the Mol-RL stage refines reasoning using a novel, task-adaptive reward system to mitigate hallucinations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MolReasoner significantly outperforms a wide range of strong baselines in both molecule generation and captioning tasks. Further analyses highlight the framework's synergistic design and its ability to produce more interpretable outputs. Our work presents a principled and effective new approach for advancing high-fidelity molecular reasoning.
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