Tag Archives: pathology

Study finds more accurate method to diagnose pancreatic cancer

"Pancreatic cancer can be difficult to diagnose because of subtle differences that distinguish between healthy tissue, cancerous tissue and tissue that is atypical, or suspicious," said Lester Layfield, MD, professor and chair of the MU School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences. "Our goal was to find a way to make a more accurate and reproducible diagnosis." Because of the pancreas’ location within the body, no routine screening methods, such as mammography for breast cancer, exist for detecting pancreatic cancer. If a physician suspects a patient may have pancreatic cancer, a biopsy of the pancreatic tissue is taken through a minimally invasive technique called endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration…

Biomarker predicts risk of breast cancer recurrence after tamoxifen treatment

"Most patients with early-stage, ER-positive breast cancer remain cancer-free after five years of tamoxifen treatment, but they remain at risk of recurrence for 15 years or longer after their initial treatment," says Dennis Sgroi, MD, of the MGH Cancer Center and Department of Pathology, lead and corresponding author of the report. "Our biomarker identifies the subgroup of patients who continue to be at risk of recurrence after tamoxifen treatment and who will benefit from extended therapy with letrozole, which should allow many women to avoid unnecessary extended treatment." Previous research by Sgroi’s team, in collaboration with investigators from bioTheranostics Inc., discovered that the ratio between levels of expression of two genes — HOXB13 and IL17BR — in tumor tissue predicted the risk of recurrence of ER-positive, lymph-node-negative breast cancer, whether or not the patient was treated with tamoxifen. …