Cancer Research

It's a trick almost everyone knows: to open a locked door, slide a credit card over the latch. Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) used a similar strategy when they attempted to disrupt the function of MYC, a cancer regulator thought to be "undruggable." The researchers found that a credit card-like molecule they developed somehow moves in and disrupts the critical interactions between MYC and its binding partner. MYC is a transcriptional factor, meaning it controls gene expression. When MYC is overexpressed or amplified, the unregulated expression of genes involved in cell…

Obstructive sleep apnea, in which people stop breathing for short periods while sleeping. Breathing pauses last from seconds to minutes and may occur 30 times per hour, after which normal breathing then starts again, often with a snoring or choking sound. About five percent of adults have some form of sleep apnea. It can ncrease the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and arrhythmias. It is most prevalent in obese people and some studies have also postulated that obstructive sleep apnea may be linked to cancer because of low levels of oxygen in the blood.  To understand whether…

Mutations in a gene named CTR9 gene that helps regulate when genes are switched on and off in cells have been found to cause rare cases of Wilms tumor, the most common kidney cancer occurring in children.  CTR9 is part of a multi-protein complex, known as PAF1, which regulates when genes are switched on and off. The PAF1 complex has many essential diverse roles in controlling cellular processes and organ development in the embryo. Interestingly, mutations of another gene in the complex, CDC73, have previously been shown to cause cancer, particularly of the parathyroid gland, but also…

Since President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer over 40 years ago, survival rates have improved dramatically and cancer rates have even gone down, despite claims that everything from DDT to nuclear energy to genetically modified foods would cause a cancer epidemic. Yet not all cancer survival has improved. Pancreatic cancer still has  the lowest survival rate of the 21 most common cancers, and in 40 years just over 3 percent of pancreatic cancer patients survive for at least five years, only a fraction more than the 2 percent who survived that long in the early 1970s. For…

BRCA1/2 genes are the most important breast cancer risks but after that, women with mutations in the PALB2 gene have on average a one in three chance of developing breast cancer by the age of seventy, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a study run through the international PALB2 Interest Group a team of researchers from 17 centres in eight countries led by the University of Cambridge analysed data from 154 families without BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, which included 362 family members with PALB2 gene mutations. The effort was funded by the European Research Council…

A paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation helps explain why brain tumors occur more often in males and frequently are more harmful than similar tumors in females. Glioblastomas, the most common malignant brain tumors, are diagnosed twice as often in males, who suffer greater cognitive impairments than females and do not survive as long. The researchers found that retinoblastoma protein (RB), a protein known to reduce cancer risk, is significantly less active in male brain cells than in female brain cells. "This is the first time anyone ever has identified a sex-linked difference that…

Women who recently used birth control pills containing high-dose estrogen and a few other formulations had an increased risk for breast cancer compared to women using some other formulations did not, according to new data published in Cancer Research. In a nested case-control study of 1,102 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 21,952 controls, Beaber and colleagues found that recent oral contraceptive use increased breast cancer risk by 50 percent, compared with never or former use. All study participants were at Group Health Cooperative in the Seattle-Puget Sound area. Patients received a…

If you go by stories of epigenetics and the microbiome, we are on the verge of curing all disease. There hasn't been this much hype since human embryonic stem cells and the human genome project were going to cure all ailments in 2000. But behind the hype there is some science, it is just figuring out what is epigenetics, what is genetics and then what is instead epidemiological matching of correlation and causation that is the struggle. DNA methylation, the addition of a methyl group (or molecule), is an epigenetic switch that can stably turn off genes, suggesting the potential to cause…

It isn't the tumor that kills up to a third of cancer patients, according to a new study, it's the indirect effects triggered by a process that is heavily studied not to fight cancer, but to fight obesity: the conversion of white fat tissue into brown fat tissue. Cachexia, also called wasting syndrome, is the name for extreme thinness and weakness due to atrophy. In their paper, researchers argue that if it is possible to reduce the transformation of fat tissue, the symptoms of cachexia will improve, although they do not completely disappear. The authors demonstrate this by blocking mediators…

The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) has expressed concern that the proposed EU General Data Protection Regulation could make cancer research impossible and add a significant burden to both doctors and cancer patients. The proposed wording of the regulation stipulates 'explicit and specific patient consent', meaning that researchers would have to approach patients every single time research is planned in order to consult their data or use tissue samples stored for research purposes.  "Hope for patients facing a life-threatening disease like cancer is based on advances in…