Cancer Research

The subject of this case-study is a 44 year old female of Indian [Asian] origin with no past history of immunodeficiency. Currently, she is in reasonable health for her age and shows no signs or symptoms of any serious illness. A genetic predisposition to sunburn rather than to tan upon exposure to the sun runs in both her mother’s and father’s families. The experimental design was identical in each trial such that the subject sat upon a park bench at noon facing the direct sunlight on a clear, sunny day. Each experiment lasted between 30 and 60 minutes following the application of…

  I have always approached the breast cancer as a problem of search and destroy: find each breast tumor while it is still so small that it hasn’t spread, and zap it before it does (Gordon, 2011). Cervical cancer was one of the biggest killers for women until the invention of the pap smear. With the pap smear we achieved very early detection of abnormal precancerous cells that are removed long before they can kill. When did you last hear of a woman dying of cervical cancer? 3D computed tomography imaging combined with ablation of suspicious lesions has the potential for accomplishing this…

Deaths due to cancer for both men and women in the United States continued to decline between 2003 and 2007, according to the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer.  Overall rates of new cancer diagnoses for men and women combined decreased an average of slightly less than 1 percent per year for the same period.  "Overall, the rate of cancer deaths is falling, but not by a lot, not nearly enough," said Edward J. Benz, Jr., MD, president of Dana-Farber Cancer in Institute in Boston. "But considering that the incidence of cancer continues to increase, while the…

CRAIGAVON, Northern Ireland, April 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Scientists from the School of Pharmacy at Queen's University Belfast and Almac Discovery Ltd, announce the first publication describing a potential new anti-angiogenic therapy based on a natural protein first discovered at QUB. Anti-angiogenics prevent the growth of new blood vessels in tumours and starve them of nutrients, leading to inhibition of tumour growth.  The paper, published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, describes the anti-angiogenic activity of the natural…

ORLANDO, Florida, April 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Cytotech Labs, a Boston based pharmaceutical company and member of the Berg Pharma, Inc. group along with Berg Biosystems and Berg Diagnostics today presented groundbreaking insight into seminal work performed by Nobel Laureate, Otto Warburg. The Warburg Hypothesis asserts that increased utilization of anaerobic respiration and production of lactate is negotiated by cancer cells in return for evasion of apoptosis, programmed cell death and other key characteristics of a healthy cell such as normally functioning mitochondria, the cell's energy…

Portuguese researchers have discovered a "broad spectrum" cancer suppressor gene called LRP1B which acts by removing proteins crucial for cancer development from the tumor environment. The fact that LRP1B does not act on the tumor itself (in this study thyroid tumors) but, instead, on molecules which are known to be important to many different cancers is what makes it so interesting. Because this means that LRP1B, and also therapies capable of inducing it (or mimicking its effect), could in theory be used to treat a variety of cancers. The study by Hugo Prazeres and Paula Soares from…

Cancer can be described as a cellular disease, which is thought to arise from misbehaving cells that divide uncontrollably in vivo. Our basic understanding of why this occurs is because these “cancer cells” have lost its ability to respond appropriately to endogenous stop signals that normally work to maintain the structural integrity of normal tissues. The resulting uncontrolled cell division results in the formation of a tumor. However, it is becoming clear that cancer doesn’t kill by just simply growing out of control. Other deadly features of cancer include their uncanny ability to…

Metastasis is when tumor cells move from the primary tumor to distant tissues - it is metastasis of the primary tumor that kills most cancer patients. One of the least studied routes of metastasis is the lymphatic system, though many tumors produce factors that promote the formation of new lymphatic vessels (lymphangiogenesis). The newly formed lymphatic vessels enable tumor cells to travel from the primary tumor to the regional lymph nodes from whence they can spread throughout the body. Current treatment practice is to surgically remove the primary tumor as well as the metastatic lymph…

Inconvenience #1: Genetics represents 10% of the risk but most of the science In the Prezi above you will notice a statistic that is corroborated by the New England Journal of Medicine: 90% of cancer risk is from non-genetic factors. One of the most striking pieces of evidence for this is a study done on women who move to the United States from Asia.  In their home country their incidence of breast cancer is quite low.  Once they move to the US their incidence rate shoots up to be identical to that of the surrounding population after just a decade. Yet, most cancer research is…

Skin cancer is the most common form of malignancy in the United States and the American Cancer Society has estimated that 1 million new cases of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer were diagnosed in 2009, while 8,650 deaths were attributable to melanoma skin cancer. Studies have supported a positive association between increased use of indoor tanning and both melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers but the indoor tanning industry is still growing rapidly, with more than $5 billion in annual revenues and more than 30 million patrons - mostly women. Despite the data, few tanners, male or…