Stem cells discovered in the esophagus
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 18,000 people will be diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the U.S. in 2014 and almost 15,500 people will die from it…
Tag Archives: development
New, precise way to turn genes on and off
The key to the advance is a new invention, called the SunTag, a series of molecular hooks for hanging multiple copies of biologically active molecules onto a single protein scaffold used to target genes or other molecules. Compared to molecules assembled without these hooks, those incorporating the SunTag can greatly amplify biological activity. …
New target for personalized brain cancer treatment: PTPRZ-MET fusion protein
Glioblastoma is the most common and deadliest form of brain cancer. The majority of these tumors – known as primary glioblastomas – occur in the elderly without evidence of a less malignant precursor. …
Immune cells in liver drive fatty liver disease, liver cancer
These liver diseases (NAFLD and NASH), along with chronic viral infections, are the most common causes of liver cancer, or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In the United States, about 90 million people suffer from NAFLD. In Europe, the figure is more than 40 million, and even in threshold countries like India and China, the number of people affected is rising due to increasingly unhealthy lifestyles. More worrying, in all of the above mentioned states the numbers of NAFLD and NASH patients is constantly increasing. …
Oral drug reduces formation of precancerous polyps in colon
The study is featured on the cover of the current issue of Cancer Research; it was published online ahead of print in September. The journal’s editors characterized the study’s findings as “striking.” Inflammatory cells in the colon, or polyps, are very common after the age of 50. The average 60-year-old has an estimated 25 percent chance of having polyps. Most polyps are benign, but some will develop into colon cancer. …
Two oncogenes linked to agressiveness and incidence of leukemia in mice
“Cdk4/6 inhibitors used in cancer treatment don’t differentiate between the two molecules. The effectiveness of blocking both proteins at once has not been demonstrated to date,” explains Malumbres…
Hormone loss could be involved in colon cancer
The researchers at Thomas Jefferson University examined colon cancer samples from 281 patients and compared those tissues to nearby colon tissue that wasn’t cancerous. They found that guanylin production — measured by number of messenger RNAs for guanylin contained in each cell — decreased 100 to 1,000 times in more than 85 percent of colon cancers tested. They verified their results by also staining for the guanylin hormone production in slices of the tissue samples. …
Flies with colon cancer help unravel genetic keys to disease in humans
“The breakthrough is that we have generated cancer in an adult organism and from stem cells, thus reproducing what happens in most types of human cancer. This model has allowed us to identify subtle interactions in the development of cancer that are practically impossible to detect in mice with the current technology available,” explains the biologist Andreu Casali, Associate Researcher at IRB Barcelona and leader of the Drosophila project. …
‘Achilles heel’ in metabolic pathway identified, could lead to new treatments for lung cancer
At the heart of this pathway lies PPARγ (peroxisome proliferation-activated receptor gamma), a protein that regulates glucose and lipid metabolism in normal cells. Researchers demonstrated that by activating PPARγ with antidiabetic drugs in lung cancer cells, they could stop these tumor cells from dividing. “We found that activation of PPARγ causes a major metabolic change in cancer cells that impairs their ability to handle oxidative stress,” said Dr…
Thyroid carcinoma: Biomarker reveals cancer cause
CLIP2 serves as a radiation marker: After exposure to radiation from radioiodine, both the genetic activity and the protein expression are increased, as the scientists’ studies were able to substantiate. CLIP2 appears to be particularly significant in the development of tumours in the thyroid gland after radiation exposure…