In the future, these findings may prove significant for the assessment of breast cancer prognosis and treatment planning. The study involved 270 breast cancer patients at Kuopio University Hospital, aged between 32 and 86 years. Breast tissue density was analysed on the basis of mammographic images obtained at the time of diagnosis…
When cancer is diagnosed, the grade of its malignancy is a central concern for both patients and their physicians. This value is used to determine how intensively and how radically the cancer must be treated. Particularly in the case of prostate cancer, the disease can take widely varying courses in different patients…
Mayo researchers studied three patients — two women and a man — who were treated for inflammatory disease and developed melanoma tumors in one eye within a year to two of taking TNF inhibitors. While this type of condition is probably rare, according to the researchers, there might be an increased risk if the patient has a pre-existing nevus (freckle of the eye). …
“Using the information from the genetic makeup of our patient’s cancer, we were able to formulate a personalised treatment,” says Dr Arturo Loaiza-Bonilla of the University of Pennsylvania, lead author of the case report published in ecancermedicalscience. This is the first reported case of the use of personalised genomic information for the successful management of ICC, as well as the first use of combined dabrafenib and trametinib therapies to treat this condition…
One area of interest focuses on histones, the chief component of chromatin, a cluster of large molecules. …
“Counting the number of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can tell us whether a patient’s cancer is aggressive, or whether it is stable and responding to therapy,” says the article’s first author Sandra V. Fernandez, Ph.D., assistant professor of Medical Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University. “Our work suggests that these cancer cells in the blood also accurately reflect the genetic status of the parent tumor or its metastases, potentially giving us a new and easy to source of genomic information to guide treatment.” First discovered for their diagnostic potential in 2004, circulating tumor cells are beginning to be used in the clinic to help guide treatment decisions and track a patient’s progress as the cancer progresses. …
It’s known that stem cells come out of the bone marrow and travel to the tiny thymus gland behind the breastbone to learn to become one of two CD4T cell types: one leads an attack, the other keeps the peace. One widely held concept of why they become one or the other is that, despite coming from the same neighborhood and going to the same school, they are exposed to different things in the thymus, said Dr. Leszek Ignatowicz, immunologist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University. In this case, the “things” are ligands and developing T cells are potentially exposed to thousands of these tiny pieces of us inside the thymus…
The University of Illinois team reports its findings in the journal Oncogene. …
Contents under Pressure Tumors, like healthy tissues, need oxygen and nutrients to survive. In order to accommodate the demands of a growing tumor, blood vessels from surrounding tissue begin to grow into the tumor. Yet, unlike normal tissue, these newly formed blood vessels are disorganized, twisty, and leaky. It’s thought that the high pressure observed in tumors is a result of these abnormal blood vessels, which leak fluid and proteins into the area between tumor cells, known as the interstitial space…
The work, as detailed in the journal Stem Cells, shows that only a bit of creative manipulation is needed to turn skin cells into human white blood cells. “The process is quick and safe in mice,” says senior author Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, holder of Salk’s Roger Guillemin Chair. “It circumvents long-standing obstacles that have plagued the reprogramming of human cells for therapeutic and regenerative purposes.” Those problems includes the long time — at least two months — and tedious laboratory work it takes to produce, characterize and differentiate induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, a method commonly used to grow new types of cells. …