Category Archives: Cancer

Two drugs before surgery help women with triple-negative breast cancer, research shows — ScienceDaily

“We found that adding either carboplatin or bevacizumab to standard preoperative chemotherapy increased pathologic complete response rates for women with basal-like cancers — that is, it increased the proportion of women who had no residual cancer detected at surgery. At the same time, we found that while carboplatin had a similar effect in the smaller group of triple-negative patients with nonbasal-like cancers, adding bevacizumab actually decreased response rates for women with nonbasal-like cancers,” says William M. Sikov, MD, associate chief of clinical research with the Program in Women’s Oncology at Women & Infants and associate professor of medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University…

Too much, too little, just right: Balance of proteins keeps cancer in check — ScienceDaily

“The p53 protein is necessary for tumor suppression,” said Xinbin Chen, professor at the UC Davis Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. “When Rbm38 suppresses p53, organisms develop tumors. Knocking out Rbm38 increases p53, which we thought might be a good thing. But too much p53 suppresses cell-cycle progression, causing cell death, premature aging and even cancer.” The relationship between p53 and Rbm38 can best be described as a loop: p53 regulates Rbm38 expression, while Rbm38 suppresses p53. …

War metaphors for cancer hurt certain prevention behaviors

But a new University of Michigan study indicates that using those words can have an unintended negative effect. David Hauser, a U-M doctoral student in psychology, and colleague Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California, found in three studies that exposure to metaphoric language relating cancer to an enemy significantly lessens the extent to which people consider cancer-prevention behaviors. …

Personalized therapy for cancer: Additional applications for FL118

In a study of preclinical models of colorectal cancer, the researchers identified an underlying mechanism for the activation of p53 by FL118. The agent activates the p53 tumor-suppressor protein largely independent of ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM)-dependent DNA damage-mediated p53 activation. ATM-dependent activation of p53 is usually induced by many — if not all — types of DNA-damage drugs, including camptothecin compounds such as irinotecan and topotecan, leading the authors to conclude that FL118’s mechanisms of action are distinct among camptothecin analogues. “While FL118 is an analogue of irinotecan and topotecan, two FDA-approved cancer drugs that are also based on the naturally occurring compound camptothecin, our findings add further evidence that FL118 has novel mechanisms of action that may make it especially potent against solid tumors and especially effective as a well-tolerated, targeted therapy,” said Dr. …

Algorithm identifies networks of genetic changes across cancers

The algorithm, called Hotnet2, was used to analyze genetic data from 12 different types of cancer assembled as part of the pan-cancer project of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The research looked at somatic mutations — those that occur in cells during one’s lifetime — and not genetic variants inherited from parents. The study identified 16 subnetworks of genes — several of which have not previously received much attention for their potential role in cancer — that are mutated with surprising frequency in the 3,281 samples in the dataset. The researchers hope the new findings, published in Nature Genetics, will provide scientists with new leads in the search for somatic mutations that drive cancer…

Potential new tool for cervical cancer detection, diagnosis

As rosy a picture as that paints, cervical cancer continues to claim far too many lives. Thousands of American women still die from the disease every year, and hundreds of thousands of other women around the world suffer the same fate — sad, stark statistics that showcase the continued need for more advanced screening methods to catch more cases of the disease early, when it is most treatable. Now a team of researchers from Central South University in China have demonstrated that a technique known as photoacoustic imaging, which is already under investigation for detecting skin or breast cancers and for monitoring therapy, also has the potential to be a new, faster, cheaper and non-invasive method to detect, diagnose and stage cervical cancer with high accuracy. …

If cells can’t move, cancer can’t grow

Using a new super-resolution microscope they’ve been able to see single molecules of the enzyme at work in a liver cancer cell line. Then they’ve used confocal microscopes to see how disrupting the enzyme slows down living cancer cells. The enzyme is DPP9 (dipeptidyl peptidase 9) which the researchers at the Centenary Institute and the Sydney Medical School were first to discover and clone, in 1999. …

Promising new method for rapidly screening cancer drugs

As Rotello and his doctoral graduate student Le Ngoc, one of the lead authors, explain, to discover a new drug for any disease, researchers must screen billions of compounds, which can take months. One of the added keys to bringing a new drug to market, they add, is to identify how it works, its chemical mechanism. “Rapid determination of drug mechanism would greatly streamline the drug discovery process, opening the pipeline of new therapeutics,” Ngoc says. She adds, “Drugs with different mechanisms cause changes in the surface of cells that can be read out using the new sensor system…

Proteins drive cancer cells to change states

Biologists have previously found that this kind of transformation, which often occurs in cancer cells as well as during embryonic development, is controlled by transcription factors — proteins that turn genes on and off. However, the new MIT research reveals that RNA-binding proteins also play an important role. Human cells have about 500 different RNA-binding proteins, which influence gene expression by regulating messenger RNA, the molecule that carries DNA’s instructions to the rest of the cell. “Recent discoveries show that there’s a lot of RNA-processing that happens in human cells and mammalian cells in general,” says Yarden Katz, a recent MIT PhD recipient and one of the lead authors of the new paper…