Cancer Research

GENEVA, Switzerland, December 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Merck KGaA announced today that it has entered into a worldwide licensing and collaboration agreement on behalf of its Merck Serono division with Idera Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (Nasdaq: IDRA) for the research, development, and commercialisation of Idera's Toll-like Receptor 9 (TLR9) agonists for the treatment of cancer. Under the agreement, Idera has agreed to exclusively license the therapeutic oncology applications, excluding their use with cancer vaccines, of its lead TLR9 agonists, IMO-2055 and IMO-2125.…

MELBOURNE, Australia, December 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Cancer Therapeutics CRC Pty Ltd and the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) today announced a collaboration to discover and develop new drugs for the treatment of many forms of cancer, based on exciting new findings in the field of DNA repair. Drs Kum Kum Khanna and Derek Richard in the Cancer and Cell Biology Division at QIMR have discovered a new protein target that is critical to the genetic repair processes that promote cancer cell survival and keep them replicating. By discovering small molecules that inhibit this protein,…

A genetic mutation expands lesions in the aorta and promotes coronary atherosclerosis, more commonly known as hardening of the arteries, according to a study by Yale School of Medicine in Cell Metabolism. The researchers found that mice engineered without the Akt1 gene and fed a high cholesterol diet had many more signs of aortic atherosclerosis compared to their littermates. And, surprisingly, their coronary lesions were similar to humans, say the scientists. “About 20 percent of the mice died spontaneously, perhaps due to an acute heart attack,” said William Sessa, senior author of the…

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, December 17 /PRNewswire/ -- - Agendia to file for expanded FDA clearance for MammaPrint(R) Agendia BV, world leader in the rapidly evolving field of molecular diagnostics, announced today that its MammaPrint(R) breast cancer prognosis test was shown to be a valuable tool to assess risk of breast cancer recurrence also in postmenopausal breast cancer patients. Data recently presented at the AACR/NCI/ EORTC conference "Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics: Discovery, Biology, and Clinical Applications" in San Francisco showed that MammaPrint is a valuable tool to…

PLANEGG-MARTINSRIED, Germany, December 17 /PRNewswire/ -- The Management Board and the Supervisory Board of the drug discovery and development company 4SC AG (Frankfurt, Prime Standard: VSC), with its headquarters in Martinsried, Germany, today published their joint statement on the public mandatory offer of Santo Holding (Deutschland) GmbH pursuant to Section 27 (1) of the German Securities Acquisition and Takeover Act (WpÜG). In the statement, both boards maintain that the offer complies with the legal requirements. Nevertheless, the Management Board and the Supervisory Board of 4SC AG…

OXFORD, England, December 17 /PRNewswire/ -- - New Deal Provides a Further Opportunity for OGeS to Grow its Therapeutic Antibody Pipeline Oxford Genome Sciences (UK) Ltd "OGeS" announces today that it has entered into a strategic collaboration with Amgen to discover, develop and commercialise novel therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer. This new collaboration will enable OGeS to further strengthen its pipeline of fully human therapeutic antibodies (mAbs) in cancer based on the target discovery capabilities of its unique OGAP(R) database. Under the collaboration, OGeS and…

Researchers of the Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have been working for more than 20 years on designing biological microchips for efficient and quick diagnostics of tuberculosis and other diseases. The BIOCHIP-IMB company was set up at the Institute for production of domestic microchips. During the press-tour on November 15, 2007, the researchers told journalists about progress and achievements. The project of the laboratory of biological microchips at the Institute of Molecular Biology (Russian Academy of Sciences ) is one of the winners at the contest of…

LONDON, December 14 /PRNewswire/ -- - The Benefits of Anastrozole (Arimidex(R)) Over Tamoxifen at Preventing Breast Cancer Recurrence Improve Over Time - Up to Four Years After Treatment Ends New data from ATAC(x), one of the world's largest and longest-running studies in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor positive (HR+), early breast cancer, reinforce that anastrozole can help many more women live cancer-free, for longer. The new data show that post-menopausal HR+ women continue to benefit from anastrozole, even up to four years after treatment ends.(1), (2) If breast cancer…

Natural selection can occur at the cellular level, where it is detrimental to health. Fortunately it is normally controlled by a well-known pattern of ongoing cell differentiation in the mature tissues of animals, according to a new study published December 14 in PLoS Computational Biology. The failure of normal cell differentiation patterns may explain cancer and senescent decline with aging, say researchers at the University of Arizona, the Santa Fe Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Wistar Institute. Darwinian natural selection and evolution is usually studied in…

Another FDA-approved targeted cancer drug, sunitinib (SutentTM, Pfizer), may be associated with cardiac toxicity, report researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston), and Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia). Their collaborative study, led by Ming Hui Chen, MD, MMSc, a cardiologist at Children’s who specializes in the cardiac health of cancer patients, appears in the December 15 issue of The Lancet, accompanied by an editorial. Sunitinib is one of several new “smart” cancer drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors that targets specific signaling…