Tag Archives: medical

Repurposing anti-depressant medication to target medulloblastoma

The multi-institutional group, led by scientists at Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute (CBDI) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, publish their results in the journal’s online edition on Aug. 24. The researchers suggest their laboratory findings in mouse models of the disease could lead to a more targeted and effective molecular therapy that would also reduce the harmful side effects of current treatments, which include chemotherapy, radiation or surgery. “Although current treatments improve survival rates, patients suffer severe side effects and relapse tumors carry mutations that resist treatment,” said lead investigator Q. …

Researchers target rapid destruction of protein responsible for cancer cell resistance to therapy

“These findings may lead to a new target for chemoresistant cancer cells,” said Ruth W. Craig, PhD, professor of Pharmacology & Toxicology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, who is primary author of the peer reviewed article. “These cells are resistant to multiple types of standard chemotherapeutic agents because of over-expression of Myeloid Cell Leukemia-1 (Mcl-1), however, Mcl-1 expression plummets when we inhibit one particular enzyme and then cancer cells subsequently die.” The Mcl-1 protein is frequently over-expressed in cancer; it is present not only in leukemia and lymphoma but also in a host of solid tumors. …

Exercise associated with reduced risk of breast cancer in African American women — ScienceDaily

In a large prospective study of the health of black women, the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS), researchers collected information about exercise habits, such as time spent exercising per week and type of exercise. They followed more than 44,000 African American women over a span of 16 years and observed whether they developed breast cancer. They found that women who exercised vigorously for seven or more hours each week were 25 percent less likely to develop breast cancer, compared to those who exercised less than one hour each week. …

Imaging system guides brain tumor removal to improve patient outcomes

The imaging system is known as desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DESI MS). The technique was developed by R. Graham Cooks, Ph.D., at Purdue University, and the brain study was done with collaborators at Harvard Medical School and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and is described in the June 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. DESI MS promises to be a significant improvement over the current method of distinguishing brain tumor tissue from healthy tissue, which relies on an extremely lengthy and difficult procedure for surgeons and patients…

Novel drug action against solid tumors explained

Their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the culmination of nearly a decade of research into the role of arginine — and its deprivation — in the generation of excessive autophagy, a process in which the cell dies by eating itself. Study co-author Hsing-Jien Kung, a cancer biologist and UC Davis professor emeritus who now leads the National Health Research Institutes in Taipei, Taiwan, first discovered the mechanism by which arginine deprivation works in 2009, when he led basic science research at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Traditional cancer therapies involve ‘poisoning’ by toxic chemicals or ‘burning’ by radiation cancer cells to death, which often have side effects,” Kung said. “An emerging strategy is to ‘starve’ cancer cells to death, taking advantage of the different metabolic requirements of normal and cancer cells. …

Medicine looking deeper into vital differences between women, men

That’s hardly an earth-shattering observation, but the fact is that, aside from the most obvious physical differences between the sexes, medicine has traditionally treated women as if they were merely smaller men. “When we look closely, we tend to find differences” between men and women, said Sarah L. Berga, M.D., professor and chair of obstetrics and gynecology and vice president for women’s health services at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “But for most of the past, we never looked.” That started to change in the late 1980s, when physicians and researchers recognized that women’s health encompassed more than those conditions unique to females; that women’s experiences with gender-common conditions and the treatments for them often differed significantly from those of men…

Breakthroughs made in ovarian cancer research

There are three predominant cancers that affect women — breast, ovarian and womb cancer. Of the three, ovarian cancer is of the greatest concern as it is usually diagnosed only at an advanced stage due to the absence of clear early warning symptoms. Successful treatment is difficult at this late stage, resulting in high mortality rates. Ovarian cancer has increased in prevalence in Singapore as well as other developed countries recently…