Cancer Research

A new paper in EBioMedicine finds that infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), one of eight known viruses in the herpes family to infect humans, may put some women at increased risk for developing breast cancer.   EBV is one of the most common viruses and is best known as the cause of infectious mononucleosis. More than 90 percent of the world's population carries EBV, and most individuals experience no effects from infection, but it has been linked to everything from cancer to Hodgkin's disease so it's hard to know which are real. To investigate, a team led by Gerburg Wulf, MD, PhD…

Given the anticipated increase in cancer imaging over the next decade [1, 2], radiologists need to solidify their position as central members of the cancer team by identifying toxicity early and understanding the implications of their findings. A team of radiologists and researchers led by Stephanie A. Holler Howard, of the Department of Radiology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, write in the American Journal of Roentgenology that they want to broaden the radiologist's understanding of imaging-evident toxicity.  Oncologists are increasingly using combinations of cytotoxic…

Scientists have discovered the switch to harness the power of cord blood and potentially increase the supply of stem cells for cancer patients needing transplantation therapy to fight their disease.  Stem cells were first discovered in Toronto in 1961 at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre  by Drs. James Till and Ernest McCulloch, a discovery that launched a new field of science and formed the basis of all stem cell research that continues to this day.  Stem cell research was uncontroversial until the late 1990s when a scientists discovered a way to create human embryonic stem…

Cancer centers promoting their services dramatically increased their advertising spending from 2005 to 2014, and  9 of the 20 that accounted for the bulk of the spending were National Cancer Institute-designated centers, so they were using taxpayer funding to advertise to taxpayers to get taxpayers to come to their centers.  Five were for-profit institutions. Scholars from Indiana University School of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Graduate School of Public Health reported in JAMA Internal Medicine that 890 cancer centers spent $173 million for…

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is useful in detecting breast tumors and in cancer evaluation but its current pre-operative use in breast conserving surgery isn't helping patients as it should.  Traditionally, patients who are scheduled to undergo breast-conserving lumpectomy for breast cancer undergo a breast MRI prior to surgery to help inform the surgeon about the size, shape, and location of the tumor. The issue is that MRIs are performed with the patient lying face down, but then the surgery is performed with the patient lying face up.  A small phase 1 clinical trial from…

You find yourself sitting in your doctor’s surgery. It’s only been a few days since your initial visit to check on these pounding headaches you’ve been waking up with, along with some dizziness, nausea and vomiting, and a general drowsy and disconnected feeling. You thought it was a flu or other common virus, but the doctor has run a few tests, including an MRI. Then your world collapses as you’re told you have a brain tumor. A biopsy would have to be taken, but if this shows it’s glioblastoma multiforme (or commonly just called glioblastoma) you may only have as little as a few months to…

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, which edits a cancer patient's T cells to recognize their tumors, has successfully helped patients with aggressive blood cancers but has yet to show the ability to treat solid tumors. To overcome this hurdle, researchers genetically engineered human T cells to produce a CAR protein that recognizes a glycopeptide found on various cancer cells but not normal cells, and then demonstrated its effectiveness in mice with leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Their proof-of-concept study appears June 21 in Immunity. "This is the first approach using a…

People with cancer are often told by their doctors approximately how long they have to live, and how well they will respond to treatments, but what if there were a way to improve the accuracy of those predictions? A new method could help, using data about patients' genetic sequences to produce more reliable projections for survival time and how they might respond to possible treatments. The technique is an innovative way of using biomedical big data -- which gleans patterns and trends from massive amounts of patient information -- to achieve precision medicine -- giving doctors the ability to…

Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) is not a single disorder, but at least 11 different diseases, and that genetic changes explain differences in survival among young AML patients, according to a new study on the genetics of AML in New England Journal of Medicine.  AML is an aggressive blood cancer that affects people of all ages, often requiring months of intensive chemotherapy in hospital. It develops in cells in the bone marrow.  Researchers studied 1540 patients with AML that were enrolled in clinical trials. They analyzed more than 100 genes known to cause leukemia, to identify…

Up to 25 percent of of lung cancer patients also have autoimmune disease, which may make them unsuitable for increasingly popular immunotherapy treatments. Researchers calculated that between 14 to 25 percent of lung cancer patients reviewed also had immune disease, and these individuals were more likely to be female and older, according to the findings reported today in JAMA Oncology.  An autoimmune disorder occurs when the immune system attacks and destroys healthy body tissue by mistake, according to The National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are more than 80 types of…