"Hot flashes affect more than 80 percent of menopausal women," said David R. Walega, M.D., chief of the Division of Pain Medicine, and program director of the Multidisciplinary Pain Medicine Fellowship Department of Anesthesiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago…
The steps leading a quiet cell to make and divvy up new parts to form daughter cells rely on some of the cell’s most complex molecular machines. Different machines play key roles at different stages of this cell cycle…
EBV causes infectious mononucleosis and cancers such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, which is the most common cancer in China, as well as opportunistic cancers in people with weakened immune systems. A member of the herpes virus family that remains in the body for life, the virus infects epithelial cells in the throat and immune cells called B cells. The researchers discovered that the virus triggers molecular events that turn off key proteins, making infected cells invisible to the natural killer T (NKT) immune cells that seek and destroy EBV-infected cells. "If you can force these invisible proteins to be expressed, then you can render infected cells visible to NKT cells, and defeat the virus. …
The results offer some of the first evidence for the existence of distinct EBV subtypes with very different public health risks. …
As explicated today in the journal Nature, methylation in fact enforces gene silencing, and it is levels of a newly identified form of RNA produced by individual genes that determines whether they are turned off by the addition of a methyl (CH3) group by the enzyme DNA methylase 1 (DNMT1). The study, led by HSCI Principal Faculty member Daniel Tenen, MD, found that during transcription of DNA to RNA, a gene produces a small amount of what the investigators named "extracoding RNA," which stays in the nucleus and binds to DNMT1, blocking its ability to methylate, or silence the gene. The discovery of RNA’s new function has therapeutic potential as an on-off switch for gene expression. "We have demonstrated, at least for one gene in detail, and probably thousands more, that extracoding RNA serves to protect the gene from methylation," said Tenen, who heads laboratories at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, where he is director, at the National University of Singapore. …
According to the American Cancer Society, more than 232,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the U.S. every year, making breast cancer the second most common type of cancer in women, after skin cancer. Many women who face this diagnosis worry about cancer recurring in the healthy breast and therefore choose to have both breasts removed, even though the risk of developing cancer in the other breast is very low. Women at high risk include those with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer and women who test positive for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations…
These findings, being published in the Oct. 4, 2013, online edition of PLOS ONE, also show that the use of a biotherapy consisting of a lysosomal protein, known as saposin C (SapC), and a phospholipid, known as dioleoylphosphatidylserine (DOPS), can be combined into tiny cavities, or nanovesicles, to target and kill pancreatic cancer cells…
Men with advanced prostate cancer typically receive hormonal therapy to reduce the level of androgens, or male hormones, in their bodies. …
In a late-breaking presentation to the 2013 European Cancer Congress (ECC2013) [1] today, Professor Hans Wildiers will say: "This study shows that even in heavily pre-treated women, 75% of whom had cancer that has spread to the internal organs, T-DM1 nearly doubles progression-free survival — the length of time before disease progression or death, whichever occurs first — compared to standard therapy, and with a more favourable safety profile. …
In research to be presented to the 2013 European Cancer Congress (ECC2013), Professor John Yarnold will say that, until now, there has been contradictory evidence as to whether gaps between radiotherapy treatments, for instance overnight or at weekends, makes any difference to the overall effectiveness of radiotherapy on breast cancer, and, if it does make a difference, why that could be. "Traditionally, breast cancer has not been regarded as a fast growing cancer, unlike some other cancer types, but our research now suggests that a significant part of the daily radiotherapy curative dose is ‘used up’ in compensating for tumour growth overnight and over weekends. We have estimated that the amount of radiotherapy dose that is used up in this way corresponds to approximately 0.60 Gray (Gy) per day," says Prof Yarnold, who is Professor of Clinical Oncology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Honorary Consultant at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust (London, UK). "This is the first numerical estimate to suggest that the duration of a course of radiotherapy has an effect on local cancer cure for patients with early breast cancer…