Tag Archives: pharmacology

Potential for added medical benefits uncovered for widely used breast cancer drug

A summary of the research, performed on a variety of different animal and human cells, was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Nov. 4, and suggests that exemestane’s effectiveness against breast cancer could be due to more than its ability to halt estrogen production, the scientists say. The study’s results further imply that the drug, a so-called aromatase (estrogen synthesis) inhibitor, could potentially be prescribed more widely, including to men, as a way to counteract the wear and tear on cells that often leads to chronic diseases. "Cells already have their own elaborate protective mechanisms, and in many cases they are ‘idling.’ The right drugs and foods can turn them on to full capacity," says Paul Talalay, M.D., the John Jacob Abel Distinguished Service Professor of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine…

Comprehensive list of gene variants developed for cancer cells from nine tissue types

The NCI-60 cancer cell panel represents nine different types of cancer: breast, ovary, prostate, colon, lung, kidney, brain, leukemia, and melanoma. In this study, the investigators sequenced the whole exomes, or DNA coding regions, of each of NCI-60 cell lines, to define novel cancer variants and aberrant patterns of gene expression in tumor cells and to relate such patterns and variants to those that occur during the development of cancer…