People with type 2 diabetes have a higher rate of cancer development and recurrence compared to the general population. This study — published online by the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism — shows that widely prescribed anti-diabetes drugs can be linked to either an increased or decreased risk of cancer, depending on the type of medication prescribed. A team of researchers led by Sangeeta Kashyap, M.D., an endocrinologist and associate professor of medicine at Cleveland Clinic’s Endocrinology & Metabolism Institute, compared two groups of drugs commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes — insulin sensitizers and insulin secretagogues…

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. …

Drug strategy blocks leading driver of cancer

Using a new strategy, UC San Francisco researchers have succeeded in making small molecules that irreversibly target a mutant form of this protein, called ras, without binding to the normal form. This feature distinguishes the molecules from all other targeted drug treatments in cancer, according to the researchers. When tested on human lung cancer cells grown in culture, the molecules efficiently killed the ras-driven cancer cells. …