Tag Archives: mgh

Observation is safe, cost-saving in low-risk prostate cancer, study suggests

Writing in the June 18 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, the authors said their statistical models showed that "observation is a reasonable and, in some situations, cost-saving alternative to initial treatment" for the estimated 70 percent of men whose cancer is classified as low-risk at diagnosis. The researchers, led by Julia Hayes, MD, a medical oncologist in the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology at Dana-Farber, said their findings support observation — active surveillance and watchful waiting — as a reasonable and underused option for men with low-risk disease. "About 70 percent of men in this country have low-risk prostate cancer, and it’s estimated that 60 percent of them are treated unnecessarily" with various forms of radiation or having the disease removed with radical prostatectomy surgery, said Hayes, who is also a senior scientist at MGH’s Institute for Technology Assessment. …

Genetic diversity within tumors predicts outcome in head and neck cancer

"Our findings will eventually allow better matching of treatments to individual patients, based on this characteristic of their tumors," says Edmund Mroz, PhD, of the MGH Center for Cancer Research, lead author of the Cancer report. "This method of measuring heterogeneity can be applied to most types of cancer, so our work should help researchers determine whether a similar relationship between heterogeneity and outcome occurs in other tumors." For decades investigators have hypothesized that tumors with a high degree of genetic heterogeneity — the result of different subgroups of cells undergoing different mutations at different DNA sites — would be more difficult to treat because particular subgroups might be more likely to survive a particular drug or radiation or to have spread before diagnosis. While recent studies have identified specific genes and proteins that can confer treatment resistance in tumors, there previously has been no way of conveniently measuring tumor heterogeneity. …

Portable device provides rapid, accurate diagnosis of tuberculosis, other bacterial infections

"Rapidly identifying the pathogen responsible for an infection and testing for the presence of resistance are critical not only for diagnosis but also for deciding which antibiotics to give a patient," says Ralph Weissleder, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Center for Systems Biology (CSB) and co-senior author of both papers. "These described methods allow us to do this in two to three hours, a vast improvement over standard culturing practice, which can take as much as two weeks to provide a diagnosis." Investigators at the MGH CSB previously developed portable devices capable of detecting cancer biomarkers in the blood or in very small tissue samples. Target cells or molecules are first labeled with magnetic nanoparticles, and the sample is then passed through a micro NMR system capable of detecting and quantifying levels of the target. But initial efforts to adapt the system to bacterial diagnosis had trouble finding antibodies — the detection method used in the earlier studies — that would accurately detect the specific bacteria…