Lung cancer is the most common and most lethal cancer worldwide. Its prognosis remains poor: The 5-year survival rate is 6-18%. Adenocarcinoma has surpassed squamous cell carcinoma as the leading histologic type, accounting for 30% of all cases of lung cancer. Hematogenous spread (i.e., carried by blood) is the most common mechanism of intrapulmonary metastasis…
SFU molecular biology and biochemistry professor Jack (Nansheng) Chen and three of his lab members collaborated with Chinese researchers to identify how these mutations affect genes and signalling pathways that might drive the formation of tumours in ICC. …
The study also shows that this same safeguard of “programmed mediocrity” that weeds out stem cells damaged by radiation allows blood cancers to grow in cases when the full body is irradiated. And by reprogramming this safeguard, we may be able to prevent cancer in the aftermath of full body radiation. “The body didn’t evolve to deal with leaking nuclear reactors and CT scans. It evolved to deal with only a few cells at a time receiving dangerous doses of radiation or other insults to their DNA,” says James DeGregori, PhD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the CU School of Medicine, and the paper’s senior author…
MS is a degenerative disease and most patients with RRMS who received disease-modifying therapies experience breakthrough disease. Autologous (using a patient’s own cells) hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) has been studied in MS with the goal of removing disease-causing immune cells and resetting the immune system, according to the study background. The Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation for Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis (HALT-MS) study examines the effectiveness of early intervention with HDIT/HCT for patients with RRMS and breakthrough disease. …
The study team reviewed data on 20,063 breast cancer patients treated at eight U.S. cancer centers between 1998 and 2007 whose cancer recurrence and secondary cancer rates were recorded in a database kept by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. …
The researchers at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute discovered that the ties which lash cells together — controlled by a protein called TIAM1 — are chopped up when cell maintenance work goes wrong. …
The research is published this month in the online journal PLOS ONE and is authored by Brad Chaires, Ph.D., John Trent, Ph.D., Robert Gray, William Dean, Ph.D., Robert Buscaglia, Shelia Thomas and Donald Miller, M.D., Ph.D. Telomerase is an enzyme largely responsible for the promotion of cell division. Within DNA, telomerase activation is a critical step for human carcinogenesis through the maintenance of telomeres. …
By mapping the specific steps that cells of melanoma, breast cancer and a blood cancer called myelofibrosis use to become resistant to drugs, the researchers now have much better targets for blocking those pathways and keeping current therapies effective. The findings are published in two papers Dec. 23, 2014, in the journal Science Signaling. “Clinical resistance to anticancer therapies is a major problem,” said lead author Kris Wood, Ph.D., assistant professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke…
“We developed 3BrPA to target a hallmark of cancer cells, namely their increased dependency on glucose compared with normal cells. But the nonencapsulated drug is toxic to healthy tissues and inactivated as it navigates through the blood, so finding a way to encapsulate the drug and protect normal tissues extends its promise in many cancers as it homes in on tumor cells,” says Jean-Francois Geschwind, M.D., chief of the Division of Interventional Radiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine. …
Patients with fatal blood cancers like leukemia often require allogenic stem cell SCT to survive. Donor stem cells are transplanted to a recipient, but not without the risk of developing GVHD, a life-threatening complication and major cause of death after SCT. The disease, which can be mild to severe, occurs when the transplanted donor cells (known as the graft) attack the patient (referred to as the host). …