Tag Archives: count

NHS cancer risk threshold ‘too high’ for patients, research indicates

Although no fixed threshold is defined for the UK, in practice, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines suggest that patients need to have symptoms which indicate a five per cent risk or higher before further tests for most cancers are carried out. In the UK, one in three people in the UK will develop cancer during their lifetime…

Capturing a hard-wired variability: What makes some identical twins noticeably different?

"We have captured a fundamental randomness at the level of gene expression that has never before been described — one that persists throughout development and into adulthood," says Ludwig scientist Rickard Sandberg at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The discovery was made possible by a powerful new technique developed by Sandberg’s lab for analyzing the global expression of genes in single cells. With the exception of a subset of genes found on sex chromosomes, every mammal inherits one copy of every gene from each of its parents. Each of those copies is known as an allele, and alleles often differ measurably from their genomic siblings — a fact that accounts for a good deal of human and animal diversity…

Cancer Statistics 2014: Death rates continue to drop

Each year, the American Cancer Society estimates the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths expected in the United States in the current year and compiles the most recent data on cancer incidence, mortality, and survival based on incidence data from the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics. The data are disseminated in two reports, Cancer Statistics, published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, and its companion article, Cancer Facts & Figures. This year’s report estimates there will be 1,665,540 new cancer cases and 585,720 cancer deaths in the United States in 2014…

International gene therapy trial for ‘bubble boy’ disease shows promising early results

Eight of the nine boys registered to date in the new trial are alive and well, with functioning immune systems and free of infections associated with SCID-X1, between nine and 36 months following treatment, according to Sung-Yun Pai, MD, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist from Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. …

Predicting ovarian cancer survival by counting tumor-attacking immune cells

Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have developed a new method for counting a special class of cancer-fighting cells — called tumor-infiltrating T lymphocytes, or TILs — reliably, quickly and cheaply in patients with early stage and advanced ovarian cancer. They describe their findings online Dec. 4 in Science Translational Medicine. …

Cancer treatment: A step towards personalized chronotherapy

An international study conducted on mice and coordinated by researchers from Inserm, CNRS and Universit Paris-Sud has paved the way towards personalized chronotherapy treatments. In an article published in the journal Cancer Research, the team has shown that the timing of optimal tolerance to irinotecan, a widely used anti-cancer drug, varies by 8 hours depending on the sex and genetic background of mice…

Interaction between two leukemia drugs explained

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a form of blood cancer based on a genetic disorder that leads to the overproduction of white blood cells. Ninety-five percent of affected patients can be treated successfully with the Novartis drug imatinib, also known as Gleevec®. Imatinib is an inhibitor that blocks the ATP-binding site of the tyrosine kinase Abl in affected blood cells, thereby suppressing their overactivity. Consequently, the pathological overproduction of leucocytes is stopped and the blood count normalizes…