Cancer Research

John Erdman, a University of Illinois professor of food science and human nutrition who also chairs the Mars, Inc. Scientific Advisory Council and has received millions in funding from Mars, Inc., recognizes that taking money from a candy bar company (Mars Inc.) to do a study of their (Mars Inc.) candy bar proving it is healthy will have skeptics. Not here. Hey, if Philip-Morris wants to highlight a study saying cigarettes cure cancer or Exxon-Mobil needs to promote a study saying automobile carbon monoxide improves asthma, we won't ridicule them just because of the funding. We'll ridicule…

DUBLIN, April 21 /PRNewswire/ -- The modern world is entrenched in a love hate affair with sugar. It proliferates throughout our daily diet, we crave it, we adore it and yet it destroys our health. To view the Multimedia News Release go to: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/zsweet/32699 Our passion for the substance has created epidemic levels in such areas as diabetes and obesity. It seems an addiction beyond the control of its victims. There is a solution. Zsweet(R) is a sugar alternative that is proven harmless to blood sugar levels. A clinical study by the Glycemic Index Laboratories in…

A close binary system of two candidate black holes in the quasar OJ 287 has shown Einstein some physics love. A central black hole, with a mass equal to 18 billion times that of the Sun, is orbited by a smaller one, and the interaction of the system with its surroundings produces brightness changes that allow astronomers to study the evolution of the orbit. This evolution is dominated by one of the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity: the emission of gravitational waves. Astronomers believe that very massive black holes lurk at the centers of most…

A connection between vitamin D level and the risk of developing breast cancer has been implicated for a long time, but its clinical relevance had not yet been proven. Sascha Abbas and colleagues from the working group headed by Dr. Jenny Chang-Claude at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), collaborating with researchers of the University Hospitals in Hamburg-Eppendorf, have now obtained clear results: While previous studies had concentrated chiefly on nutritional vitamin D, the researchers have now investigated the complete vitamin D status. To this end…

The blueprint for the human body is encoded in genes. Gene expression is the process by which those blueprints are converted into proteins that make up the body’s structures and send its signals. When molecular biologists began analyzing the complete set of human genes (the human genome) in 2001, one surprise was that humans have as few as 30,000 genes when, given their complexity, they should have more than 100,000. How can humans have one-fifth as much genetic material as wheat, for instance, or share one quarter of their genes with fish? One answer is that humans do more with fewer genes…

The chemical marks littering the DNA inside our cells have been like trees in front of us - important, but we couldn't see the whole forest so we could study one gene at a time. New high-throughput DNA sequencing technology has enabled researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to map the precise position of individual DNA modifications throughout the genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and chart its effect on the activity of any of Arabidopsis’ roughly 26,000 genes. The Salk study, which appears today in Cell, paints a detailed picture of a dynamic and ever-changing,…

EXTON, Pennsylvania, April 16 /PRNewswire/ -- - Upon Marketing Authorization Orphan Status Would Provide for Ten Years of Market Exclusivity in the European Union for Both Investigational Treatments Morphotek(R), Inc., a subsidiary of Eisai Corporation of North America, announced today that the European Commission has granted orphan drug status to the monoclonal antibodies - farletuzumab (also known as MORAb-003) for the treatment of ovarian cancer and MORAb-009 for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. Farletuzumab is currently being evaluated in a Phase II efficacy study in patients with…

CALGARY, Canada, April 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Oncolytics Biotech Inc. ("Oncolytics") (TSX:ONC, NASDAQ:ONCY) announced today that Prof. Alan Melcher and his research group at St. James's University Hospital in Leeds, U.K. published the results of their work in the April 10 online issue of Gene Therapy. The paper is entitled "Inflammatory Tumour Cell Killing by Oncolytic Reovirus for the Treatment of Melanoma." The investigators showed that reovirus effectively kills and replicates in both human melanoma cell lines and freshly resected tumour. They demonstrated that reovirus melanoma killing is…

GENEVA, April 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Merck Serono and its US affiliate EMD Serono, Inc., both part of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, announced today a planned expansion of EMD Serono's US presence with an anticipated investment of $50 million at its Billerica facility northwest of Boston, Massachusetts. The company anticipates that this investment will create more than 100 new jobs in Massachusetts. The investment will support the construction of a center of excellence in discovery, creating critical mass in research with a common goal of finding new treatments for unmet medical needs. "This…

CALGARY, Canada, April 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Oncolytics Biotech Inc. (TSX: ONC) (NASDAQ: ONCY) announced that a poster presentation by Dr. Anders Kolb of the Nemours Center for Childhood Cancer Research entitled "Radiation in Combination with Reolysin for Pediatric Sarcomas" was presented today at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting. The meeting is being held in San Diego, California from April 12-16, 2008. "The combination of REOLYSIN(R) with radiation is certainly favourable," said Dr. Kolb. "Statistically significant improvements in event-free survival are seen…