Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women, and metastasis is a major cause of health deterioration and death from the disease. Management of metastasis is difficult for several reasons…
In the journal Cell Reports, published today online, the scientists describe how the powerful master regulatory transcription factor Bcl6 regulates the genome, ensuring that aggressive lymphomas survive and thrive. They also show how the Bcl6 inhibitor, developed at Weill Cornell, effectively gums up the protein, stopping it from working…
As described in the journal Biomicrofluidics, which is produced by AIP Publishing, a team led by Gang Li, Ph.D., from Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is developing a portable device for point-of-care diagnostic testing to detect cancer at its earliest stages. It identifies cancer biomarkers, which are biological indicators of the disease that often circulate in the blood prior to the appearance of symptoms. The new device is based on microfluidics — a technology that has rapidly expanded over the past decade and involves miniature devices that tightly control and manipulate tiny amounts of fluids for analysis through channels at the micro- and nano-scales…
Now a research team led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center has identified an entirely new approach to enhance normal tissue growth, a finding that could have widespread therapeutic applications. Their findings were published on-line this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Tissue regeneration is a process that is not fully understood, but previous research has demonstrated that endothelial cells lining the insides of small blood vessels play a key role in tissue growth. …
And after almost a decade of bicoastal collaboration, Emmanuelle Passegué, now a professor in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, San Francisco, and Amy Wagers, a professor in Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, have the answer. They have found that cancer stem cells actively remodel the environment of the bone marrow, where blood cells are formed, so that it is hospitable only to diseased cells. This finding could influence the effectiveness of bone marrow transplants, currently the only cure for late-stage leukemia, but with a 25 percent success rate due to repopulation of residual cancer cells…
The discoveries improve the chances of developing more targeted therapies in place of existing drugs, which do not always work or come with side effects. Experts estimate that 60 to 90 percent of the world’s population carry the human cytomegalovirus, or CMV, which is one of the eight herpes viruses that infect humans…
The finding offers the potential that these stem cells could somehow be turned back on, offering a new form of treatment for the condition, called Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). The work was led by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London with the support of Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute…
It’s in the early stages, but genistein, derived from soybeans and other plants, shows promise in inhibiting the HIV infection, says Yuntao Wu, a professor with the George Mason-based National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases and the Department of Molecular and Microbiology. …
This achievement shatters the previous record, setting a new benchmark for the most sensitive limit of detection, and may significantly advance early disease diagnostics. …
Seventy percent of breast cancer patients have estrogen receptor positive cancer, and most patients respond well to anti-estrogen therapies, for a few years at least. Within 15 years, however, 50% will relapse and eventually die from the disease. Dr Andrew Stone, Professor Susan Clark and Professor Liz Musgrove, from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in collaboration with scientists from Cardiff University, have demonstrated that the BCL-2 gene becomes epigenetically ‘silenced’ in resistant tumours. This process is potentially detectable in the blood, providing a diagnostic marker. …