Tag Archives: medicine

Patients treated with radiation therapy who have tumors in left breast have comparable overall survival to those with tumors in right breast –…

Studies have shown that breast cancer patients treated with radiation therapy have improved local-regional recurrence, and breast cancer-specific survival after breast-conserving surgery and overall survival (OS) after mastectomy. Long-term follow-up of historic radiation therapy trials for breast cancer has demonstrated a potential increase in cardiac mortality. However, these studies used earlier modes of radiation therapy including Cobalt and orthovoltage radiotherapy, and did not employ CT-based planning, which allows for greater cardiac avoidance. Three recent studies suggest that cardiac mortality has not been greater for patients treated for left-sided breast cancer since the 1980s, when techniques allowing for greater cardiac avoidance became more commonplace[1-3]. …

First step: From human cells to tissue-engineered esophagus

The tissue-engineered esophagus formed on a relatively simple biodegradable scaffold after the researchers transplanted mouse and human organ-specific stem/progenitor cells into a murine model, according to principal investigator Tracy C. Grikscheit, MD, of the Developmental Biology and Regenerative Medicine program of The Saban Research Institute and pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles…

Personalized ovarian cancer vaccines developed

“This has the potential to dramatically change how we treat cancer,” says Dr. Pramod Srivastava, director of the Carole and Ray Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center at UConn Health and one of the principal investigators on the study. “This research will serve as the basis for the first ever genomics-driven personalized medicine clinical trial in immunotherapy of ovarian cancer, and will begin at UConn Health this fall,” Srivastava says. UConn bioinformatics engineer Ion Mandoiu, associate professor of computer science and engineering, collaborated as the other principal investigator for the study, which has been in development for the past four years…

New treatment target identified for aggressive breast cancer — ScienceDaily

The gene ErbB2, commonly called HER2, is highly expressed in about 25 percent of breast cancers. Scientists have now found the protein Erbin, thought to be an anti-tumor factor, also is highly expressed in these cancers and essential to ErbB2’s support of breast cancer. When scientists interfere with the interaction between the two in mice, it inhibits tumor development and the usual spread to the lungs, according to an international team reporting in the journal PNAS. The team documented the overexpression of both in 171 cases of mostly aggressive human breast cancer as well. …

Ebola highlights disparity of disease burden in developed vs. developing countries

“Our goal is to provide information about trends and patterns to bring to light what’s going on around the world so that funds can be allocated and policy developed as needed,” says Lindsay Boyers, medical student at Georgetown University, working in the lab or Robert Dellavalle, MD, PhD, MSPH investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, associate professor of dermatology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and the paper’s senior author. The paper used data from the Global Burden of Disease Study, an ongoing project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to collect a billion data points describing the distribution of the world’s diseases. Of the 269 diseases in the GBD database, this study compares rates in developed versus developing countries of Ebola, malignant melanoma, basal and squamous cell carcinoma, decubitus ulcer, bacterial skin diseases, cellulitis, varicella (including chickenpox, congenital varicella infection, and herpes zoster), syphilis, measles, and dengue. Specifically, findings show that in 2010 the measles death rate was 197 times greater in developing countries than in developed countries, but this ratio was down from 345-to-1 in 1990. …

Personalized cellular therapy achieves complete remission in 90 percent of acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients studied

The new data, which builds on preliminary findings presented at the American Society of Hematology’s annual meeting in December 2013, include results from the first 25 children and young adults (ages 5 to 22) treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and first five adults (ages 26 to 60) treated at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Twenty-seven of the 30 patients in the studies achieved a complete remission after receiving an infusion of these engineered “hunter” cells, and 78 percent of the patients were alive six months after treatment. “The patients who participated in these trials had relapsed as many as four times, including 60 percent whose cancers came back even after stem cell transplants. Their cancers were so aggressive they had no treatment options left,” said the study’s senior author, Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, a professor of Pediatrics in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and director of Translational Research in the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia…

Oral drug reduces formation of precancerous polyps in colon

The study is featured on the cover of the current issue of Cancer Research; it was published online ahead of print in September. The journal’s editors characterized the study’s findings as “striking.” Inflammatory cells in the colon, or polyps, are very common after the age of 50. The average 60-year-old has an estimated 25 percent chance of having polyps. Most polyps are benign, but some will develop into colon cancer. …