Cancer Research

Obese women have greater risk of developing a weight-related cancer in their lifetime than women of a healthy weight, according to new statistics.  Obesity increases a woman's risk of developing at least seven types of cancer - including bowel, post-menopausal breast, gallbladder, womb, kidney, pancreatic and esophageal cancer - and in a group of obese women, 274 will be diagnosed with a bodyweight-linked cancer in their lifetime, compared to 194 women diagnosed in a group of 1,000 healthy weight women. A 40 percent higher rate. The figures released by Cancer Research UK today…

Metastatic melanoma is the leading cause of skin cancer deaths in the United States because once has spread - metastasized - life expectancy for patients is dramatically shortened. Melanoma diagnosis and treatment has progressed a lot and the future looks even brighter but the current reference therapy for patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma is Dacarbazine (DTIC), which is associated with relatively poor patient outcomes. In a new study, researchers found that standard treatments for metastatic melanoma are not effective against a growth factor protein called Nodal. The study also…

Gastric bypass and similar stomach-shrinking surgeries are a popular option for obese patients looking to lose weight and they have even been linked to a decreased risk in many types of cancers - except colon cancer. A 2013 long-term study of 77,000 obese patients found that colon cancer rates were higher but a new study in mice could explain the association - and raise safety concerns for a new generation of weight-loss drugs.  Gut hormones and bile acids aid in digestion, but some, such as glucagon-like peptide-2 (GLP-2), are also gut growth factors, which stimulate cell division in…

Researchers have found that by changing the selectivity of an enzyme, a small molecule could potentially be used to decrease the likelihood of alcohol-related cancers in an at-risk population. Enzymes are enablers, highly specialized parts of cellular machinery tasked with bringing together molecules to make it easier for chemical reactions to happen. Sometimes enzymes are defective and malfunction, which can cause diseases. In a study of mice, the researchers discovered a creative way to circumvent the problems caused by a defective enzyme. They used a small molecule to "hijack," or change…

Cancer vaccines turn the body's own immune system specifically against tumor cells and one area of study are vaccines that are directed against neoantigens, proteins that have undergone a genetic mutation in tumor cells and are therefore different than counterparts in healthy cells. The tiny alteration - sometimes only a single protein building block has been changed - gives the protein on the tumor cell surface novel immunological characteristics that can be recognized as "foreign" by the immune system's T cells. Therapeutic vaccines using a short protein fragment, or peptide, specifically…

A new study has found that giving acetate supplements sped up the growth and metastasis of tumors in mice. Acetate is a major compound produced in the gut by host bacteria, which can have beneficial and also potentially harmful effects on human health. Further studies are needed to determine whether restricting acetate production by gut bacteria will affect growth of tumors. Cancer, the second leading cause of death in the US, is estimated to account for nearly 1 out of every 4 deaths in 2014. It can have a significant impact on length and quality of life, which carries a tremendous…

A cancer false alarm could put people off checking out cancer symptoms they develop in the future, according to a review of papers. More than 80 percent of patients with potential cancer symptoms are given the all-clear after investigations. But according to the new paper, having a false alarm might discourage people from seeking help, even years later, if they notice possible symptoms of the disease again. The researchers, from the Health Behaviour Research Centre at UCL (University College London), carried out the review of 19 studies. It suggested that patients may delay seeking help for…

Colorectal carcinoma, colon cancer, is the third most common cancer in the United States.  So-called microsatellite stable colorectal cancer with mutations in the BRAF gene represents a particularly aggressive form. The BRAF gene produces the enzyme B-Raf, which plays a critical role in controlling cell division. A team of researchers from Freiburg and Stuttgart including the Freiburg biologists Dr. Ricarda Herr and Dr. Tilman Brummer analyzed the effect of B-Raf inhibitors on the behavior of colorectal cancer cells in three-dimensional tissue culture. Their findings show that B-Raf…

By:  Karin Heineman, Inside Science (Inside Science TV) – Shelley Tworoger, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital located in Boston, Massachusetts studied ovarian cancer. "This is one of the largest and oldest cohort studies in the world. We followed over 230,000 women over several decades and every two years they answered questionnaires about their lifestyle and health, in particular we asked them every 4 years to report back to us the kinds of foods that they eat. We used this information to look at what women ate and we followed them up to see who got ovarian cancer and…

Image: Peter Hermes Furian In 1971 Richard Nixon declared “War on Cancer” with the signing of the National Cancer Act. Significant progress has been made in the intervening 44 years – and Europe has been at the forefront of many of the advances. But on February 4, World Cancer Day, it is worth asking whether we are winning the war on a disease which affects more than 22m people annually? First, the good news – more people are surviving cancer than are dying of the disease. The recent European Cancer Registry shows that in Europe there were almost 16m cancer survivors in 2012. Understanding…