Tag Archives: discovery

Scientists map gene changes driving tumors in common pediatric soft-tissue cancer

Rhabdomyosarcoma is the most common soft-tissue sarcoma in children and affects muscles in any part of the body. Among patients diagnosed with non-metastasized disease, about 80 percent survive at least five years, although they may experience substantial treatment-related toxic effects. However, for those with metastatic disease, the five-year survival rate is about 30 percent even with aggressive treatment…

Scientists propose breast cancer drug for bladder cancer patients

As with breast cancer, HER2 amplification in MPUC results in a faster growing form of cancer that spreads quickly and has a higher chance of recurrence. The hope is that combating this amplification with trastuzumab, a drug that is effective in HER2 positive breast cancers, will result in effective therapy against bladder cancer. "These findings show it is critical for pathologists to recognize this type of bladder cancer and that providers should be aware of and order the appropriate tests," says John Cheville, M.D., a Mayo Clinic pathologist and lead author of the study. …

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…

Blood test to locate gene defects associated with cancer may not be far off

The findings are based on research led by Raghu Kalluri, M.D., Ph.D., chairman and professor in MD Anderson’s Department of Cancer Biology. The research results appear in the current online edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. "At the present time, there is no single blood test that can screen for all cancer related DNA defects," said Kalluri. "In many cases, current protocols require a tumor sample to determine whether gene mutations and deletions exist and therefore determine whether the tumor itself is cancerous or benign. …

Solution found to problem limiting development of human stem cell therapies

The achievement, published in a paper in this week’s early online edition of the journal Cell Stem Cell by a collaboration that included scientists from China, was enabled by the development of "humanized" laboratory mice that contained a functional human immune system capable of mounting a vigorous immune rejection of foreign cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. …

DNA clamp to grab cancer before it develops

Toward a new generation of screening tests An increasing number of genetic mutations have been identified as risk factors for the development of cancer and many other diseases. Several research groups have attempted to develop rapid and inexpensive screening methods for detecting these mutations. "The results of our study have considerable implications in the area of diagnostics and therapeutics," says Professor Francesco Ricci, "because the DNA clamp can be adapted to provide a fluorescent signal in the presence of DNA sequences having mutations with high risk for certain types cancer. …

Role for sugar uptake in breast cancer revealed

"A dramatic increase in sugar uptake could be a cause of oncogenesis," Bissell says. "Furthermore, through a series of painstaking analysis, we have discovered two new pathways through which increased uptake of glucose could itself activate other oncogenic pathways. This discovery provides possible new targets for diagnosis and therapeutics." Working with Bissell, Yasuhito Onodera, a Japanese postdoctoral fellow in her research group who is now an assistant professor in Japan, examined the expression of glucose transporter proteins in human breast cells. The focus was on the glucose transporter known as GLUT3, the concentrations of which Onodera and Bissell showed are 400 times greater in malignant than in non-malignant breast cells…