Tag Archives: online

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…

Pathway that contributes to Alzheimer’s disease revealed by research

Their study, in the online issue of Neuron, offers the potential that targeting this specific defect with drugs “may rejuvenate or rescue this pathway,” says the study’s lead investigator, Guojun Bu, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Fla. “This defect is likely not the sole contributor to development of Alzheimer’s disease, but our findings suggest it is very important, and could be therapeutically targeted to possibly prevent Alzheimer’s or treat early disease,” he says. …

Better way to track emerging cell therapies using MRIs

In a paper published September 17 in the online journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh and elsewhere describe the first human tests of using a perfluorocarbon (PFC) tracer in combination with non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track therapeutic immune cells injected into patients with colorectal cancer. “Initially, we see this technique used for clinical trials that involve tests of new cell therapies,” said first author Eric T. Ahrens, PhD, professor in the Department of Radiology at UC San Diego…