Tag Archives: medicine

Herding cancer cells to their death

If caught early, melanoma is relatively easy to treat. But in its late stages, it is a stubborn and deadly cancer. Until about a decade ago, patients survived only about seven months after starting treatment. Since then, therapies, such as vemurafenib, that specifically target signaling proteins essential to the proliferation and survival of melanoma cells have extended the lives of some patients. …

Men who can’t produce sperm face increased cancer risk

"An azoospermic man’s risk for developing cancer is similar to that for a typical man 10 years older," said Michael Eisenberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of urology at the medical school and director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at Stanford Hospital & Clinics. Eisenberg is lead author of the study, published online June 20 in Fertility and Sterility. …

Pluripotent stem cells made from pancreatic cancer cells are first human model of the cancer’s progression

Still, researchers and clinicians don’t have a non-invasive way to even detect early cells that portent later disease. ‘There’s no PSA test for pancreatic cancer,’ they say, and that’s one of the main reasons why pancreatic cancer is detected so late in its course. They have been searching for a human-cell model of early-disease progression…