Category Archives: Cancer

Blood test may help diagnose pancreatic cancer

In research published today in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, Murray Korc, M.D., the Myles Brand Professor of Cancer Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and a researcher at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, and colleagues found that several microRNAs — small RNA molecules — circulate at high levels in the blood of pancreatic cancer patients. “This is a new finding that extends previous knowledge in this field,” Dr. Korc said. …

Mushroom extract, AHCC, helpful in treating HPV

The results were presented at the 11th International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology in Houston today by principal investigator Judith A. Smith, Pharm.D., associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the UTHealth Medical School. Ten HPV-positive women were treated orally with the extract, AHCC (active hexose correlated compound) once daily for up to six months…

Improving breast cancer chemo by testing patient’s tumors in a dish

A team of biomedical engineers at Vanderbilt University headed by Assistant Professor Melissa Skala has developed the technique, which uses fluorescence imaging to monitor the response of three-dimensional chunks of tumors removed from patients and exposed to different anti-cancer drugs. In an article published last month by the journal Cancer Research the engineers describe applying the technique to the three major forms of breast cancer. …

Tea, citrus products could lower ovarian cancer risk, new research finds

The research reveals that women who consume foods containing flavonols and flavanones (both subclasses of dietary flavonoids) significantly decrease their risk of developing epithelial ovarian cancer, the fifth-leading cause of cancer death among women. The research team studied the dietary habits of 171,940 women aged between 25 and 55 for more than three decades. The team found that those who consumed food and drinks high in flavonols (found in tea, red wine, apples and grapes) and flavanones (found in citrus fruit and juices) were less likely to develop the disease. Ovarian cancer affects more than 6,500 women in the UK each year…

Prostate cancer, kidney disease detected in urine samples on the spot — ScienceDaily

But a cunningly simple new device can stop that vital information from “going to waste.” Brigham Young University chemist Adam Woolley and his students made a device that can detect markers of kidney disease and prostate cancer in a few minutes. All you have to do is drop a sample into a tiny tube and see how far it goes…

Chest radiation to treat childhood cancer increases patients’ risk of breast cancer — ScienceDaily

Wilms tumor is a rare childhood kidney cancer that can spread to the lungs. When this spread occurs, patients receive a relatively low dose of 12-14 Gray of radiation therapy to the entire chest. To see if such exposure to radiation affects patients’ risk of developing breast cancer, Norman Breslow, PhD, of the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, led a team that studied nearly 2500 young women who had been treated for Wilms tumor during childhood and who had survived until at least 15 years of age…

Anti-cancer drug effective against common stem cell transplant complication

“Bortezomib helped a group of patients who desperately needed a treatment, having failed multiple different therapies,” said UC Davis hematologist and associate professor Mehrdad Abedi, lead author on the paper. “The drug fights chronic graft-versus host disease, and unlike other GVHD therapies such as steroid, cyclosporine or mycophenolate, it treats chronic GVHD without dampening the graft-versus-tumor effect, which can be critically important to help patients avoid relapse. In fact, because bortezomib is an anti-cancer drug, it potentially attacks cancer cells in its own right.” The trial results were published in October in the journal Blood. Chronic GVHD strikes patients who have received stem cell transplants from donors, commonly called allogeneic transplants. …

A switch to dampen malignancy

“We were trying to identify molecular switches that control the plasticity of epithelial cells,” says Ludwig Oxford director Xin Lu, who led the study with Yajun Guo of The Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, China. “Such plasticity is a hallmark of cancer. In order to metastasize, a settled cancer cell must loosen its structure, wiggle free from its confines, travel to another part of the body and, once there, settle down to form a colony…

Unsuspected gene found frequently mutated in colorectal, endometrial cancers

Reporting in the October 26, 2014 edition of Nature Genetics, investigators from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard said the mutated gene helps control an important cell-signaling pathway, Wnt, that has been implicated in many forms of cancer. They suggest that the RNF43 mutation may serve as a biomarker that identifies patients with colorectal and endometrial cancer who could benefit from precision cancer drugs that target the Wnt pathway, although no such drugs are currently available. “Tumors that have this mutation may be telling us that they are dependent on the Wnt signaling pathway, and they will be uniquely sensitive to drugs that inhibit this pathway,” said Charles Fuchs, MD, MPH, an author of the paper and director of the Center for Gastrointestinal Cancer at Dana-Farber. He is also affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health…