However, the growing trend in developed countries to delay having children until later in life has resulted in egg freezing being increasingly used by healthy women as insurance against age-related infertility. …
Unlike other mammals used in research, dogs develop cancer spontaneously as humans do and cancer is the most common cause of death in this species. The dog genome has been obtained in recent years, but we still don’t know how is controlled and regulated, what we call the epigenome. This week the team led by Manel Esteller, director of the Program for Epigenetics and Cancer Biology (PEBC) at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), Professor of Genetics at the University of Barcelona and ICREA researcher, has characterized the dog’s epigenome and transferred the results to human cancer to understand the changes in appearance of tumors. The finding is published this week in the journal Cancer Research. …
The research, conducted by the Medical Center’s Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) under the direction of Anthony Atala, M.D., institute director, gives boys who have a high risk of becoming sterile the option to “bank” a small piece of testicular tissue prior to treatment. “The average survival rates for childhood cancer are around 80 percent, but a side effect of some treatments can be permanent sterility,” said Thomas W. McLean, M.D., a pediatric cancer specialist, who co-leads the experimental biological bank with Hooman Sadri-Ardekani, M.D., Ph.D., a male infertility specialist at WFIRM. …
They used the platform to identify a novel antibody that is undergoing further investigation as a potential treatment for breast, ovarian and other cancers. In research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in the lab of Stephen Weiss at the U-M Life Sciences Institute detail an approach that replicates the native environment of cancer cells and increases the likelihood that drugs effective against the growth of tumor cells in test tube models will also stop cancer from growing in humans. The researchers have used their method to identify an antibody that stops breast cancer tumor growth in animal models, and they are investigating the antibody as a potential treatment in humans. …
“Anorexia and cachexia are among the most troubling and distressing symptoms of advanced cancer, for both patients and their families,” says the study’s principal investigator, Dr Jennifer Temel from the Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA. Symptoms of the wasting syndrome can include a loss of weight and muscles, together with fatigue, weakness, and loss of appetite. The condition is very common in patients with advanced lung cancer. Anamorelin aims to address the symptoms by mimicking the effects of the so-called “hunger hormone” ghrelin, which is secreted by the stomach…
Dr Martin Chasen, lead author and medical director, Palliative Care, Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre, Canada, said: “This agent makes a significant difference in the way people tolerate their chemotherapy. Patients experienced no loss in quality of life and, in fact, many saw meaningful improvements. One of the patients in the rolapitant cohort reported that he had just finished 18 holes of golf one week after receiving chemotherapy…
Researchers say the results demonstrate the need for better collaboration between doctors and health authorities on an international scale, to ensure patients have access to the best treatments. Coordinated action is needed at an international level to ensure new cancer-fighting drugs are approved in a timely manner, oncologists said at the Congress. Their call came after a survey revealed that patients in some regions sometimes wait years longer than their counterparts elsewhere for new drugs to be approved. The drug approval process is important to ensure that safe and effective therapies are made available for patients, explains study senior author Dr Sunil Verma from Sunnybrook Odette Cancer Center, Toronto, Canada. …
Among more than 50 lung cancer clinical trials examined, more than 80 percent excluded patients with prior cancer from participating, according to the study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. …
Their study, in the online issue of Neuron, offers the potential that targeting this specific defect with drugs “may rejuvenate or rescue this pathway,” says the study’s lead investigator, Guojun Bu, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Fla. “This defect is likely not the sole contributor to development of Alzheimer’s disease, but our findings suggest it is very important, and could be therapeutically targeted to possibly prevent Alzheimer’s or treat early disease,” he says. …
Their work, performed in a mouse model of melanoma, found that combining exercise with chemotherapy shrunk tumors more than chemotherapy alone. Joseph Libonati, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and director of the Laboratory of Innovative and Translational Nursing Research, was the senior author on the study, which appears in the American Journal of Physiology. His collaborators included Penn Nursing’s Geetha Muthukumaran, Dennis Ding and Akinyemi Bajulaiye plus Kathleen Sturgeon, Keri Schadler, Nicholas J. …