Tag Archives: king

Promising approach to improve outcome for children with high-risk leukemia

Combining the drug gemtuzumab ozogamicin (GO) with conventional chemotherapy may improve the outcome of bone marrow transplantation for some children battling high-risk acute myeloid leukemia (AML), according to a study led by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The results appear in the current edition of the journal Cancer…

Exercise training as ‘prehabilitation’ before surgery

CPET is a non-invasive measurement of the cardiovascular and respiratory system during exercise to assess exercise capacity and cardiopulmonary fitness. According to the researchers, the role of exercise training or ‘prehabilitation’ for optimising preoperative physiological function to counter catabolic effects of surgery has received little attention in cancer patients…

Molecule common in some cancers, rheumatoid arthritis leads to potential therapy for both

The study, published in Oncotarget, was led by investigators at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC), and included collaborators from Harvard and Columbia Universities, Mayo Clinic and Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. "Our findings suggest that cadherin-11 is important for cancer progression as well as rheumatoid arthritis — for reasons we do not fully understand. …

Plant oil suppresses viability of human prostate cancer cells

"This line of work dates back to the 1980s when the University of Wisconsin groups led by Drs. Charles Elson and Michael Gould discovered the anti-tumor activity of monoterpenes and soon after, sesqui- and di-terpenes." said Dr. Huanbiao Mo, senior author and professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences. These compounds, widely present in fruits, vegetables and grains, were found to be much more effective in suppressing the growth of tumor cells than that of normal cells. …

Early stages breast cancer could soon be diagnosed from blood samples

With a New York University Cancer Institute colleague, the researchers report in an upcoming Clinical Chemistry (now online) that the mixture of free-floating blood proteins created by the enzyme carboxypeptidase N accurately predicted the presence of early-stage breast cancer tissue in mice and in a small population of human patients. "In this paper we link the catalytic activity of carboxypeptidase N to tumor progression in clinical samples from breast cancer patients and a breast cancer animal model," said biomedical engineer Tony Hu, Ph.D., who led the project. "Our results indicate that circulating peptides generated by CPN can serve as clear signatures of early disease onset and progression." The technology is not yet available to the public, and may not be for years. More extensive clinical tests are needed, and those tests are expected to begin in early 2014…

Finding antitumor T cells in a patient’s own cancer

In a paper recently published in Clinical Cancer Research, investigators in the lab of Daniel Powell, PhD, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, demonstrated for the first time that a T cell activation molecule can be used as a biomarker to identify rare antitumor T cells in human cancers. The molecule, CD137, is a protein that is not normally found on the surface of resting T cells but its expression is induced when the T cell is activated…

Experimental regimen tested for small cell lung cancer

Small cell lung cancer, which includes oat cell carcinoma, is a more aggressive disease than other types of lung cancer and often is more advanced at the time of diagnosis. Smoking is the most common cause of the diagnosis and can be diagnosed even decades after an individual has quit. At advanced stages of the disease, it is incurable in the vast majority of patients, with a median survival less than 12 months. Mita said that following a diagnosis of small cell lung cancer, most patients opt for immediate chemotherapy using the standard-of-care chemotherapy’s etoposide and cisplatin — two drugs developed more than three decades ago…