Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Yong Tang led a study discovering that MTDH — a cancer fitness gene previously shown by the Kang Lab to play a key tumor-intrinsic role in breast cancer progression — also functions in normal host tissue to help cancer spread, acting in both hepatocytes and hematopoietic tissue. Yong's work showed that tumor-derived exosomes disrupt MTDH-dependent fat metabolism in liver cells, creating a lipid-rich environment that weakens CD8⁺ T cell immune responses, which are themselves intrinsically regulated by MTDH function. Published in Cell Metabolism, these findings point to MTDH as a promising target for improving host response to aggressive cancers, particularly in patients with metabolic dysfunction.