Tag Archives: medicine

Researchers uncover why combination drug treatment ineffective in cancer clinical trials

Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry researcher Michael Sawyer and his colleagues, including first author Vijaya Damaraju, recently published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal, Clinical Cancer Research. In the ’80s and ’90s, cancer research focused on finding out which proteins "drove" cancers. New drugs targeting these proteins worked well by themselves, and some in the field believed combining the new drugs with the older chemotherapy drugs would work better than either drug by itself. …

Cancer mutation likely trigger of scleroderma

A report on the discovery, published in the Dec. 5 issue of Science, also suggests that a normal immune system is critical for preventing the development of common types of cancer. According to researchers, patients with scleroderma often make immune proteins or antibodies to another protein, called RPC1. These antibodies are believed to cause the organ damage characteristic of the disease, and the reason behind this antibody production has remained unknown…

Protein in prostate biopsies signals increased cancer risk

Their findings, reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, are the first to quantify, in the setting of a clinical trial, the increased risk of prostate cancer development from the protein ERG. Traditional means of determining risk of prostate cancer — blood tests for the protein prostate-specific antigen (PSA) and biopsies — do not always correlate well with the chances of dying from the disease. Decisions on what to do with the results of these tests can be unclear, leaving doctors and patients frustrated and unsure of how to proceed. …

Researchers turn to machines to identify breast cancer type

Since each cell in the body contains 23,000 genes, identifying the specific genes involved in cancer growth is an exceedingly complex task. Researchers used a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning to identify three genes that allowed them to determine whether a tumour was fed by estrogen. "People can’t possibly sort through all this information and find the important patterns," said senior author Russ Greiner, a professor in the Department of Computing Science and investigator with the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning. …

Researchers unravel role of Rb tumor suppressor in aggressive breast cancer

The findings of Rb’s role at multiple points in the disease process point to a potential new therapeutic target in patients with the most aggressive subset of breast cancer, known as basal-like breast carcinomas. This type of cancer has no estrogen receptor expression, and to date there is no efficient therapy for patients who suffer from it, leaving them with a generally poor prognosis. …

New study suggests low vitamin D causes damage to brain

In addition to being essential for maintaining bone health, newer evidence shows that vitamin D serves important roles in other organs and tissue, including the brain. Published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, the UK study showed that middle-aged rats that were fed a diet low in vitamin D for several months developed free radical damage to the brain, and many different brain proteins were damaged as identified by redox proteomics. These rats also showed a significant decrease in cognitive performance on tests of learning and memory. "Given that vitamin D deficiency is especially widespread among the elderly, we investigated how during aging from middle-age to old-age how low vitamin D affected the oxidative status of the brain," said lead author on the paper Allan Butterfield, professor in the UK Department of Chemistry, director of the Center of Membrane Sciences, faculty of Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, and director of the Free Radical Biology in Cancer Core of the Markey Cancer Center. …

Molecular imaging tracers help determine treatment plans for brain metastases

Brain metastases occur in 20-40 percent of all cancer patients, particularly in those with non-small cell lung cancer, breast cancer and melanoma. They account for 170,000 new cases per year in the United States, and prognosis is poor. Treatment for brain metastases typically includes a combination of surgery, radiation treatment and chemotherapy…

New means of growing intestinal stem cells

The small intestine, like most other body tissues, has a small store of immature adult stem cells that can differentiate into more mature, specialized cell types. Until now, there has been no good way to grow large numbers of these stem cells, because they only remain immature while in contact with a type of supportive cells called Paneth cells. In a new study appearing in the Dec. …

Colon cancer researchers target stem cells, discover viable new therapeutic path

"This is the first step toward clinically applying the principles of cancer stem cell biology to control cancer growth and advance the development of durable cures," says principal investigator Dr. John Dick about the findings published online today in Nature Medicine…