During radiation therapy for brain cancer, progenitor cells that later mature to produce the protective myelin coating around neurons are lost or significantly depleted, and there is no treatment available to restore them. These myelinating cells–called oligodendrocytes–are critical for shielding and repairing the brain’s neurons throughout life. …
Assessing if and how far breast cancer has spread throughout the body is what doctor’s refer to as staging. …
Assessing if and how far breast cancer has spread throughout the body is what doctor’s refer to as staging. Most women nowadays are diagnosed at earlier stages, meaning stage 1 or 2 of possible 4 stages (stated Christopher Riedl, MD). Current National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines consider systemic FDG-PET/CT staging for only stage III breast cancer patients. …
The researchers, whose results were published today in Cell, successfully grew six prostate cancer organoids from biopsies of patients with metastatic prostate cancer and a seventh organoid from a patient’s circulating tumor cells. Organoids are three-dimensional structures composed of cells that are grouped together and spatially organized like an organ. The histology, or tissue structure, of the prostate cancer organoids is highly similar to the metastasis sample from which they came. Sequencing of the metastasis samples and the matched organoids showed that each organoid is genetically identical to the patient’s cancer from which it originated. …
Moritz F. Kircher and colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center point out that malignant brain tumors, particularly the kind known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), are among the toughest to beat…
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140617164153.htm
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140227134706.htm
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220102610.htm
"With current techniques, we would typically have to grow pluripotent stem cell-derived cells for 60 or more years in order to model a late-onset disease," says senior study author Lorenz Studer of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. "Now, with progerin-induced aging, we can accelerate this process down to a period of a few days or weeks. This should greatly simplify the study of many late-onset diseases that are of such great burden to our aging society." Modeling a specific patient’s disease in a dish is possible with iPSC approaches, which involve taking skin cells from patients and reprogramming them to embryonic-like stem cells capable of turning into other disease-relevant cell types like neurons or blood cells. But iPSC-derived cells are immature and often take months to become functional, similar to the slow development of the human embryo. …