Cancer Research

How cancer can suddenly reappear months, or years after treatment is complete is an ongoing mystery in incology. A new study finds dormant tumor cells might have become latent because they cannibalized—basically ate—the body’s own stem cells. The team had been working on teaching adult stem cells from bone marrow, called mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs), to fight cancer when they noticed that the MSCs were disappearing from the cell cultures. The team was working on teaching adult stem cells from bone marrow, called mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs), to fight cancer when they…

A recent news post on an exciting breakthrough in prostate cancer, which appeared this month of November 2016, piqued my interest since the subject was close to the research I worked on myself as a postdoctoral researcher.   I worked on deciphering the types of genes that were altered in prostate cancer in the presence or absence of the androgen hormone. Of course, I was concerned with picking out a few relevant genes and working on them individually rather than deciphering the signaling pathway involved.   And so, coming to the relevance of this blog post, you can understand why…

Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological malignancy., the seventh most common cancer in women and the 18th most common cancer overall, with over 200,000 new cases worldwide each year. Using epigenomic analysis of patient tumors we have found common DNA methylation patterns in the most common subtype of ovarian cancer, high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC)., which has the highest mortality rate.  The mortality rate is high because patients are generally diagnosed in an already advanced stage  Epigenetic modifications like DNA methylation are known to frequently affect…

One in six women (17 percent) diagnosed with breast cancer go to their doctor with a symptom other than a lump - the most commonly reported breast cancer symptom - according to data from 2009/10 National Audit of Cancer Diagnosis in Primary Care presented at the 2016 National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer conference in Liverpool. There are more than 53,600 breast cancers diagnosed in the UK every year and 11,400 deaths from the disease annually. Breast symptoms, other than a breast lump, that may be a sign of cancer (termed 'non-lump' in the study) include nipple abnormalities,…

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal forms of cancer. Early detection is essential to improve prognoses. Working toward that goal, a collaboration of researchers in Japan has discovered proteins in the blood which improve the detection of pancreatic cancer. When used in combination with conventional pancreatic cancer biomarkers, it enables the diagnosis of early stage pancreatic cancer, which was previously thought to be difficult. To discover biomarkers useful in detecting pancreatic cancer, the researchers decided to analyze the genes of proteins which were reported to have higher…

Tumours are an accumulation of cells that divide without control, accumulating hundreds of chromosomal alterations and mutations in their DNA. These alterations are triggered in part by a type of damage to the DNA known as replicative stress. To survive in the face of this chaos, tumour cells need the intervention of the damage response protein ATR, known for its role as guardian of genome integrity, to which they become addicted. After eight years of work, Oscar Fernández-Capetillo's team at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has discovered that blocking this protein has…

With over 120,000 patients in the United States waiting for a kidney transplant, scientists and physicians are constantly looking to expand the pool of available organs through increasing donation and optimizing allocation. Researchers analyzed data from thousands of transplants and developed a scoring system for donor kidneys that they hope might expand the pool of available organs in two ways. They published their findings in the Annals of Transplantation. "The gift of life is so precious. It's imperative that we use each and every organ in the most efficient way for our patients, donors…

People with the most common type of lung cancer whose disease has spread to the brain could be spared potentially harmful whole brain radiotherapy, according to new research published in The Lancet. The phase 3 randomized trial found that whole brain radiotherapy had no beneficial effect on length or quality of survival over treatment with steroids and other supportive care. Despite its widespread use, until now there has been no robust evidence to determine whether whole brain radiotherapy, which can have substantial side effects (eg, fatigue, nausea, neurotoxicity), is better than best…

While preventing cancer is impossible, what will be possible soon is making cancer far more manageable, like diabetes, and treatment far less debilitating. A new drug delivery system called a "metronomic dosage regimen," uses significantly lower doses of chemotherapeutic drugs but at more frequent time intervals. This would have multiple goals of killing cancer cells, creating a hostile biological environment for their growth, reducing toxicity from the drug regimen and avoiding the development of resistance to the cancer drugs being used. The Chemistry of Materials paper says it is a more…

The duration of overweight and obesity in women's adult lives is correlated with cancer risk in a PLOS Medicine longitudinal study. Yet its finding are not going to be taken seriously because they use body mass index (BMI) and link it epidemiologically to the risk of developing several types of cancer, the go-to methodology of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which has come under fire for conflating hazard and risk, declaring sausage as hazardous as cigarette smoking. BMI has been disqualified for such use because it has been so easily abused, yet lead author…