Tag Archives: massachusetts

Papillary thyroid carcinoma: New research

In the presentation “Impact of Radioactive Iodine on Survival in Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma,” Paritosh Suman, M.D. and colleagues from North Shore University Health System (Evanston, IL), explore the benefit of (RAI) treatment following surgery to remove the thyroid in patients with PTC, and whether survival benefit relates to tumor size. In a retrospective study of nearly 285,000 patients treated over 13 years, with a mean follow-up of 7 years, the authors found that 47% of patients had RAI therapy and it showed a small but statistically significant survival benefit regardless of the tumor size. Carrie Lubitz, M.D., M.P.H., Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston), and coauthors previously described a novel blood-based assay for detecting the V600E mutation in the BRAF gene in patients with melanoma…

Optimal particle size for anticancer nanomedicines discovered

“To develop next generation nanomedicines with superior anti-cancer attributes, we must understand the correlation between their physicochemical properties — specifically, particle size — and their interactions with biological systems,” explains Jianjun Cheng, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cheng and his collaborators systematically evaluated the size-dependent biological profiles of three monodisperse drug-silica nanoconjugates at 20, 50 and 200 nm…

Early Sign of Pancreatic Cancer identified by researchers

Although the increase isn’t large enough to be the basis of a new test for early detection of the disease, the findings will help researchers better understand how pancreatic cancer affects the rest of the body, particularly how it can trigger the sometimes deadly muscle-wasting disease known as cachexia. “Most people with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) [by far the most common form of cancreatic cancer] are diagnosed after the disease has reached an advanced stage, and many die within a year of diagnosis,” said Brian Wolpin, MD, MPH, of Dana-Farber, co-senior author of the new study with Matthew Vander Heiden, MD, PhD, of MIT and Dana-Farber. “Detecting the disease earlier in its development may improve our ability to treat it successfully. In this study, we asked whether PDAC produces metabolic changes – changes in the way the body uses energy and nutrients – that can be detected before the disease is diagnosed.” The researchers utilized blood samples collected years earlier from 1,500 people participating in large health-tracking studies. …

Crizotinib treatment effective against ROS1-positive lung cancer, study suggests

“Prior to this study, there were a handful of reports describing marked responses to crizotinib in individual patients with ROS1-positive lung tumors,” says Alice Shaw, MD, PhD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center, lead author of the NEJM report. “This is the first definitive study to establish crizotinib’s activity in a large group of patients with ROS1-positive lung cancer and to confirm that ROS1 is a bona fide therapeutic target in those patients.” Crizotinib currently is FDA-approved to treat non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC) driven by rearrangments in the ALK gene, which make up around 4 percent of cases…

Gene expression patterns in pancreatic circulating tumor cells revealed

“Our ability to combine a novel microfluidic CTC isolation device, developed here at MGH, with single-cell RNA sequencing has given us new biological insights into these cells and revealed novel avenues to try and block the spread of cancer,” says lead author David T. Ting, MD, MGH Cancer Center. Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of tumors because it spreads rapidly via CTCs carried in the bloodstream. …

Non-toxic strategy to treat leukemia proposed by researchers

Harvard Stem Cell Institute scientists at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Harvard University Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology led the work, published in the journal Cell, in collaboration with researchers at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s been known for decades that cancer cells use energy differently than most cell types,” said senior author David Scadden, MD. “So we thought, maybe there are metabolism differences between blood stem cells and their immediate descendants; and are they so different from cancer that you might able to manipulate energy sources with something that could have an effect on cancer and not harm normal cells?” Scadden’s team began by examining blood stem cells and their direct offspring — blood progenitor cells that have a more limited ability to differentiate. The researchers modified the way the cells take up nutrients in two ways: via a glucose (sugar) on-off switch, and through subtle adjustments that raise or lower glucose, like a volume dial. …