Tag Archives: cancer

Herding cancer cells to their death

If caught early, melanoma is relatively easy to treat. But in its late stages, it is a stubborn and deadly cancer. Until about a decade ago, patients survived only about seven months after starting treatment. Since then, therapies, such as vemurafenib, that specifically target signaling proteins essential to the proliferation and survival of melanoma cells have extended the lives of some patients. …

Men who can’t produce sperm face increased cancer risk

"An azoospermic man’s risk for developing cancer is similar to that for a typical man 10 years older," said Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at Stanford Hospital & Clinics. Eisenberg is lead author of the study, published online June 20 in Fertility and Sterility. …

Genetic variants predicting aggressive prostate cancers identified

Their study was published in the online journal PLOS ONE in April. According to the authors, prostate cancer accounts for 20 percent of all cancers and 9 percent of cancer deaths. It is the most common cancer and was the second leading cause of cancer death in American men in 2012. "For most prostate cancer patients, the disease progresses relatively slowly," said study co-author Hui-Yi Lin, Ph.D., assistant member of the Chemical Biology and Molecular Medicine Program at Moffitt. …

Pluripotent stem cells made from pancreatic cancer cells are first human model of the cancer’s progression

Still, researchers and clinicians don’t have a non-invasive way to even detect early cells that portent later disease. ‘There’s no PSA test for pancreatic cancer,’ they say, and that’s one of the main reasons why pancreatic cancer is detected so late in its course. They have been searching for a human-cell model of early-disease progression…

Realistic 3-d tumor created through tissue engineering using silk scaffolds

The team comprised Professor James Goh, Associate Professor Toh Siew Lok and Dr Pamela Tan from the Department of Bioengineering at NUS Faculty of Engineering, and Associate Professor Saminathan Suresh Nathan from the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, who carried out their study using osteosarcoma, which is the most prevalent form of paediatric primary bone cancer. Reconstructing tumours in the laboratory has been a hot topic for research as current methods of testing have not been sufficient to yield concrete results. Dr Tan, who has been researching on the 3-D model for her PhD thesis, said: "Despite the urgent need to develop cancer therapeutics, little progress has been made due to the lack of good pre-clinical drug testing models. …