Tag Archives: materials

New educational modules harness power of e-learning for pancreatic cancer education

The ePOSSOM endeavour was jointly developed by ecancer and the Severn Postgraduate School of Surgery, where surgical trainees led by Miss Katrina Butcher developed the content of the modules, providing key educational information for other surgical trainees and healthcare professionals. “ePOSSOM creates innovative e-learning material for audiences across the world, allowing each learner access to complex evidence-based medicine, wherever their learning environment allows them,” Miss Butcher writes in the accompanying editorial. These modules follow the UK ISCP (Intercollegiate Surgical Curriculum Programme) Curriculum, and aim to be a concise, up-to-date best evidence resource, for either new learning or revision. Experts from across the UK have contributed to and peer-reviewed the modules to ensure that the content is of the highest scientific quality — and poised on the frontier of pancreatic cancer knowledge. …

Study may lead to early detection, better outcomes for lymphedema patients — ScienceDaily

The study is testing bioimpedance spectroscopy, a device where electrodes are placed on the patient’s arms so that the fluid buildup can be accurately measured. The randomized study is enrolling 1,100 research subjects over two years at five sites in the United States and Australia. “Many in the health care community, and even breast cancer patients, don’t understand that this lifelong arm swelling is a possible result of breast cancer treatment, but others of us have been working on this issue for decades,” said principal investigator Sheila H. …

Immunotherapy could stop resistance to radiotherapy

The researchers, based at The University of Manchester and funded by MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, and Cancer Research UK, found that combining the two treatments helped the immune system hunt down and destroy cancer cells that weren’t killed by the initial radiotherapy in mice with breast, skin and bowel cancers. Radiotherapy is a very successful treatment for many forms of cancer, but in cancer cells that it doesn’t kill it can switch on a ‘flag’ on their surface, called PD-L1, that tricks the body’s defences into thinking that cancerous cells pose no threat. The immunotherapy works by blocking these ‘flags’ to reveal the true identity of cancer cells, allowing the immune system to see them for what they are and destroy them. The approach improved survival and protected the mice against the disease from returning. …

New way to detox? ‘Gold of Pleasure’ oilseed boosts liver detoxification enzymes

“The bioactive compounds in Camelina sativa seed, also known as Gold of Pleasure, are a mixture of phytochemicals that work together synergistically far better than they do alone. This seed meal is a promising nutritional supplement because its bioactive ingredients increase the liver’s ability to clear foreign chemicals and oxidative products. And that gives it potential anti-cancer benefit,” said Elizabeth Jeffery, a U of I professor of nutritional toxicology. Oilseed crops, including rapeseed, canola, and camelina, contain some of the same bioactive ingredients — namely, glucosinolates and flavonoids — found in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables and in nearly the same quantities, she noted. …

Disease decoded: Gene mutation may lead to development of new cancer drugs

Scientists at the University of Michigan and the U-M Health System recently discovered a protein mutation that causes the devastating disease dyskeratosis congenita, in which precious hematopoietic stem cells can’t regenerate and make new blood. People with DC age prematurely and are prone to cancer and bone marrow failure. But the study findings reach far beyond the roughly one in 1 million known DC patients, and could ultimately lead to developing new drugs that prevent cancer from spreading, said Jayakrishnan Nandakumar, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. …