Tag Archives: cloud

Triple-negative breast cancer patients should undergo genetic screening

“Clinicians need to think hard about screening all their triple-negative patients for mutations because there is a lot of value in learning that information, both in terms of the risk of recurrence to the individual and the risk to family members. In addition, there may be very specific therapeutic benefits of knowing if you have a mutation in a particular gene,” says Fergus Couch, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic and lead author of the study. The study found that almost 15 percent of triple-negative breast cancer patients had deleterious (harmful) mutations in predisposition genes. The vast majority of these mutations appeared in genes involved in the repair of DNA damage, suggesting that the origins of triple-negative breast cancer may be different from other forms of the disease. …

Gene associated with an aggressive breast cancer uncovered — ScienceDaily

TNBC is deadly because, unlike other types of breast cancers such as estrogen receptor (ER) positive or HER2 amplified breast tumours which have effective targeted therapy, TNBC tumours do not respond to targeted therapy. Breast cancer has many subtypes, each with its own genetic makeup. …

Bitter food but good medicine from cucumber genetics

“You don’t eat wild cucumber, unless you want to use it as a purgative,” said William Lucas, professor of plant biology at the University of California, Davis and coauthor on the paper to be published Nov. 28 in the journal Science. That bitter flavor in wild cucurbits — the family that includes cucumber, pumpkin, melon, watermelon and squash — is due to compounds called cucurbitacins. The bitter taste protects wild plants against predators. …

Ovarian cancer patients may benefit from pelvic radiotherapy

“Despite the intense therapeutic and surgical regimen typically used to treat ovarian cancer, outcomes remain poor,” said William Small Jr., MD, chair, Department of Radiation Oncology, LUHS. “This study provided encouraging preliminary results for the use of RT in women with ovarian cancer.” The study evaluated 56 patients with ovarian clear cell adenocarcinoma (CCA), an aggressive form of ovarian cancer that is more likely to be resistant to chemotherapy and to have a poorer prognosis than other forms of this disease. …

One-two punch of drugs better than either alone against colorectal cancer

Of course, researchers have extensively targeted these two signaling pathways, designing drugs that turn on or off genes in these pathways, thus interrupting the transmission of cancer-causing signals. Unfortunately, these pathways have proven difficult to drug and also it has been difficult to show the effectiveness of drugs that successfully interrupt the transmission of signals along these pathways. A study by the University of Colorado Cancer Center published in the journal PLoS ONE and concurrent phase I clinical trial is examining a new strategy: targeting both these important cancer-causing pathways simultaneously. “Well, these two pathways are mutated frequently in cancer. …