The new statistical method will be able to determine who will need a bone-marrow transplantation and who can be spared the extreme burden that this excruciating treatment entails. The results have recently been published in Blood. Many types of lymphoma Lymphoma can be divided into approximately 60 subgroups. The prognoses are unpredictable…
Cancer Research UK scientists have discovered that acral melanomas — the rare type of skin cancer that caused reggae musician Bob Marley’s death — are genetically distinct from other more common types of skin cancer, according to a study published in the journal Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research. Acral melanoma most often affects the palms of the hands, soles of the feet, nail-beds and other hairless parts of the skin. Unlike other more common types of melanoma, it’s not caused by UV damage from the sun. The team, from the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute at The University of Manchester, sequenced the tumours of five patients with acral melanoma and combined this with data from three other patients. …
Such disorders are caused by faulty DNA repair systems that increase the risk for cancer and other conditions. The findings are published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Regents Professor Michael Smerdon and post-doctoral researcher Peng Mao found that when DNA is damaged, a specific protein must first be “unbuckled” to allow easy access for the DNA “repair crew.” Without this unbuckling, entry to the damaged site is hampered by the compact arrangement of genes and protein in chromosomes called chromatin. …
The letters in the human genome carry instructions to make proteins, via a three-letter code. …
The study was conducted amongst children with Down’s syndrome — who are 20-50 times more prone to childhood leukemias than other children — and involved analysing the DNA sequence of patients at different stages of leukemia. The researchers uncovered that two key genes (called RAS and JAK) can mutate to turn normal blood cells into cancer cells. However, these two genes never mutate together, as one seems to exclude the other. This discovery means we can begin to identify which of the two genes are mutated in patients, and therefore more effectively target their cancer in lower doses (reducing toxicity for the patient) with less side-effects…
Up to 80% of breast cancers overproduce the oestrogen receptor (ER), and many also overproduce the progesterone receptor (PR), which drive the growth of tumours. …
Analyzing these modifications can provide important clues to the type of tumor a patient has, and how it will respond to different drugs. For example, patients with glioblastoma, a type of brain tumor, respond well to a certain class of drugs known as alkylating agents if the DNA-repair gene MGMT is silenced by epigenetic modification…
Their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the culmination of nearly a decade of research into the role of arginine — and its deprivation — in the generation of excessive autophagy, a process in which the cell dies by eating itself. Study co-author Hsing-Jien Kung, a cancer biologist and UC Davis professor emeritus who now leads the National Health Research Institutes in Taipei, Taiwan, first discovered the mechanism by which arginine deprivation works in 2009, when he led basic science research at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Traditional cancer therapies involve ‘poisoning’ by toxic chemicals or ‘burning’ by radiation cancer cells to death, which often have side effects,” Kung said…
Using the genome editing tool known as CRISPR, the Duke University researchers were able to selectively destroy two viral genes responsible for the growth and survival of cervical carcinoma cells, causing the cancer cells to self-destruct. The findings, appearing online August 7 in the Journal of Virology, give credence to an approach only recently attempted in mammalian cells, and could pave the way toward antiviral strategies targeted against other DNA-based viruses like hepatitis B and herpes simplex. “Because this approach is only going after viral genes, there should be no off-target effects on normal cells,” said Bryan R. …
The varying health risks from exposure to natural uranium are well established, but Diane Stearns, professor of biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, and her team have been trying to determine if there is a link between uranium exposure and skin cancer, stating that skin may have been overlooked in the past. In a recent article published in the Journal of Applied Toxicology, the NAU team shared results from a study that explored photoactivation of uranium as a means to increase its toxicity and ability to damage DNA. …