Tag Archives: drug

Targeted treatment could halt womb cancer growth — ScienceDaily

The scientists, from the Division of Gynaecologic Oncology at Yale School of Medicine funded by the National Institutes of Health, showed that the drug afatinib not only killed off uterine serous cancer cells after stopping their growth but also caused tumors to shrink. The drug, a type of personalized medicine, attacks faults in the HER2 gene which lie at the heart of the cancer cells. This stops the disease in its tracks. Drugs which target HER2 are already used to treat breast cancer…

Fine tuning nanoparticles for the medical industry

The Nanoparticles by Design Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University is trying to develop new particles with unprecedented properties that still meet these requirements. Recently, Dr. Jeong-Hwan Kim took one step forward when he experimented with a new type of nanomaterial: the nanosheet. Specifically, he designed a strong, stable, and optically traceable smart 2-D material that responds to pH, or the acidity or basicity of its surrounding environment…

Transplant drug could boost power of brain tumor treatments, study finds

In experiments in animals, researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School showed that adding rapamycin to an immunotherapy approach strengthened the immune response against brain tumor cells. What’s more, the drug also increased the immune system’s “memory” cells so that they could attack the tumor if it ever reared its head again…

Nivolumab shows signs of superior response rate compared to standard chemotherapy in advanced melanoma

“Previously-treated advanced melanoma patients have limited options,” says the study’s principal investigator, Professor Jeffrey Weber, Director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research Center of Excellence at the Moffitt Cancer Centre, Tampa, Florida. Nivolumab is an antibody in a class of drugs called ‘checkpoint inhibitors’, that act to relieve a critical brake placed on the immune system by the tumour itself. The drug then reinvigorates patients’ anti-tumour immune response and promotes shrinkage of the tumour…

Discrepancies in access to new cancer drugs revealed

Researchers say the results demonstrate the need for better collaboration between doctors and health authorities on an international scale, to ensure patients have access to the best treatments. Coordinated action is needed at an international level to ensure new cancer-fighting drugs are approved in a timely manner, oncologists said at the Congress. Their call came after a survey revealed that patients in some regions sometimes wait years longer than their counterparts elsewhere for new drugs to be approved. The drug approval process is important to ensure that safe and effective therapies are made available for patients, explains study senior author Dr Sunil Verma from Sunnybrook Odette Cancer Center, Toronto, Canada. …

Exercise boosts tumor-fighting ability of chemotherapy, team finds

Their work, performed in a mouse model of melanoma, found that combining exercise with chemotherapy shrunk tumors more than chemotherapy alone. Joseph Libonati, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and director of the Laboratory of Innovative and Translational Nursing Research, was the senior author on the study, which appears in the American Journal of Physiology. His collaborators included Penn Nursing’s Geetha Muthukumaran, Dennis Ding and Akinyemi Bajulaiye plus Kathleen Sturgeon, Keri Schadler, Nicholas J. …

Role of hormone in response to ovarian cancer treatment

The work comes out of the molecular therapeutic laboratory directed by Richard G. Moore, MD, of Women & Infants’ Program in Women’s Oncology. Entitled “HE4 expression is associated with hormonal elements and mediated by importin-dependent nuclear translocation,” the research was recently published in the international science journal Scientific Reports, a Nature publishing group. The goal of the study was to investigate the role of the hormone HE4 in modulating an ovarian cancer’s response to hormones and hormonal therapies. …

Liposome research meets nanotechnology to improve cancer treatment

While radiotherapy can precisely target just the tumor site, systemic chemotherapy spreads a wide net, sending drugs speeding throughout the entire body in an attempt to kill cancer cells while also killing many healthy cells. Neither of these methods is highly effective when applied alone, therefore separated sessions of chemo and radiotherapy are required when fighting against solid tumors. Reports have shown that ideally, both methods would be employed at the same time…

First clinical trial on HER-2-negative breast cancer with nintedanib shows promising results — ScienceDaily

According to Miguel Ángel Quintela, head of the Unit: “The drug combination of paclitaxel and nintedanib has turned out to be a complete success, given that it is proved to be safe and that the pathologic complete response [rate of complete recovery] was 50%, which doubles the response compared to patients treated with standard therapy with paclitaxel.” The trial has also included 10 HER-2-negative breast cancer patients, all of them in early stages of the disease. In light of the results, the CNIO Breast Cancer Clinical Research Unit has already launched a large-scale Phase II Clinical Trial to validate the results in a large group of patients. These results, including biomarker studies that will facilitate advances in personalised medicine, will be released by early 2015…

Simeprevir in hepatitis C: Added benefit for certain patients

The drug manufacturer dossier provided indications and hints of an added benefit of simeprevir when the patients infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotype 1 have been untreated before or have relapsed after initially successful treatment. It is not possible to rate the extent of added benefit, however…