When taken by mouth, the drug was well tolerated with limited toxicity. An intravenous form, delivered within a liposome, was just as effective with fewer side effects. Both approaches — described in the October 22, 2014 issue of Science Translational Medicine — led to complete regression of transplanted tumors. …
“What we have produced is essentially a system that localizes the epicenter of infection and provides real-time tracking of bacterial activity, giving us rapid feedback on how the bacteria respond to antibiotics,” says principal investigator Sanjay Jain, M.D., an infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and director of the Center for Inflammation Imaging and Research at Johns Hopkins. Describing their work in the Oct. …
“When you take Vitamin D and put it on prostate cancer cells, it inhibits their growth. But it hasn’t been proven as an anti-cancer agent…
“When you take Vitamin D and put it on prostate cancer cells, it inhibits their growth. But it hasn’t been proven as an anti-cancer agent…
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, provides evidence for how these particular melanoma cells help tumors resist drugs designed to block blood vessel formation. “For a long time the hope has been that anti-angiogenic therapies would starve tumors of the nutrients they need to thrive, but these drugs haven’t worked as well as we all had hoped,” said Andrew C…
Delivering cancer drugs directly to tumors is difficult. Scientists are working on new approaches to overcome the natural limitations of drugs, including loading them into nanoparticles. “The drug is packaged into a lipid ball significantly smaller than the width of a hair to make it soluble in the blood stream and prevent negative side effects. The drug-containing nanoparticle ball then travels in the bloodstream to the tumor, where it accumulates and the drug is released in the tumor to kill the cancer cells,” said Gavin Robertson, professor of pharmacology, pathology, dermatology, and surgery and director of the Penn State Hershey Melanoma Center. …
Now a research team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has identified an unexpected link between a transcription factor known to regulate speech and language development and metastatic colonization of breast cancer. Currently described online in Cell Stem Cell, the new findings demonstrate that, when silenced, the FOXP2 transcription factor, otherwise known as the speech gene, endows breast cancer cells with a number of malignant traits and properties that enable them to survive — and thrive. “We have identified a previously undescribed function for the transcription factor FOXP2 in breast cancer,” explains senior author Antoine Karnoub, PhD, an investigator in the Department of Pathology at BIDMC and Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School…
They found that the use of trastuzumab produced a 37 percent improvement in survival and a 40 percent reduction in risk of cancer occurrence, compared to patients treated with chemotherapy alone. These findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, demonstrate how important trastuzumab has been to the treatment of this form of breast cancer, says the study’s lead author, Edith A. Perez, M.D., deputy director at large, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and director of the Breast Cancer Translational Genomics Program at Mayo Clinic in Florida…
Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have uncovered details about how cancer is able to become drug resistant over time, a phenomenon that occurs because cancer cells within the same tumor aren’t identical — the cells have slight genetic variation, or diversity. The new work, published October 20 in PNAS, shows how variations in breast cancer cells’ RNA, the molecule that decodes genes and produces proteins, helps the cancer to evolve more quickly than previously thought. These new findings may potentially point to a “switch” to turn off this diversity — and thereby drug resistance — in cancer cells. …
Dr Jason Greenwood from Queen’s Centre for Plasma Physics collaborated with academics from Italy and Spain on the work on electrons, which has been published in the international journal Science. Using some of the shortest laser pulses in the world, the researchers used strobe lighting to track the ultra-fast movement of the electrons within a nanometer-sized molecule of amino acid. The resulting oscillations — lasting for 4,300 attoseconds (billion-billionths of a second) — amount to the fastest process ever observed in a biological structure. …