Tag Archives: professor

Mammography benefits women over 75, new study finds

The value of mammography screening in older women has been subject to much debate in recent years. The American Cancer Society recommends annual mammograms for women age 75 and older as long as they are in good health, while the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) does not recommend mammography screening in this age group, citing insufficient evidence to evaluate benefits and harms. A lack of research is chiefly responsible for the divergent recommendations, according to Judith A…

Genomic analysis of prostate cancer indicates best course of action after surgery — ScienceDaily

“We are moving away from treating everyone the same,” says first author Robert Den, M.D., Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology and Cancer Biology at Thomas Jefferson University. “Genomic tools are letting us gauge which cancers are more aggressive and should be treated earlier with radiation, and which ones are unlikely to benefit from additional therapy.” Although surgery for prostate cancer is meant to be curative, in some men, the cancer can regrow. Doctors have developed high risk criteria based on clinical factors, but these criteria are imperfect predictors of cancer returning, or recurrence. Only about 50 percent of high risk patients ever go on to develop metastases, raising the question of whether those who receive additional therapy are being overtreated. …

Same cancer, different time zone: Cancer cells each grow at different speeds, study shows — ScienceDaily

In fact, depending on the tumor cell, they grow at dramatically different speeds, according to a study led by Nicholas Navin, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Genetics at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The study findings may have important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer…

Protein ZEB1 promotes breast tumor resistance to radiation therapy

One protein with the even more out-there name of ZEB1 (zinc finger E-box binding homeobox 1), is now thought to keep breast cancer cells from being successfully treated with radiation therapy, according to a study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Li Ma, Ph.D., an assistant professor of experimental radiation oncology at MD Anderson, reported in this month’s issue of Nature Cell Biology that ZEB1 may actually be helping breast tumor cells repair DNA damage caused by radiation treatment by ramping up a first-line of defense known as DNA damage response pathway. …

Tumor suppressor mutations alone don’t explain deadly cancer: Biomarker for head and neck cancers identified

The study, published online August 3 in the journal Nature Genetics, shows that high mortality rates among head and neck cancer patients tend to occur only when mutations in the tumor suppressor gene coincide with missing segments of genetic material on the cancer genome’s third chromosome. The link between the two had not been observed before because the mutations co-occur in about 70 percent of head and neck tumors and because full genetic fingerprints of large numbers of cancer tumors have become available only recently…

Self-assembling anti-cancer molecules created in minutes: Like a self-assembling ‘Lego Death Star’

The chemists, led by Professor Peter Scott at the University of Warwick, UK, have been able to produce molecules that have a similar structure to peptides which are naturally produced in the body to fight cancer and infection. Published in Nature Chemistry, the molecules produced in the research have proved effective against colon cancer cells in laboratory tests, in collaboration with Roger Phillips at the Institute for Cancer Therapeutics, Bradford, UK…

Discovery of pro-metastasis protein reveals mysterious link to neurodegeneration — ScienceDaily

In work published earlier this month in Nature, they identify a protein that appears to act as a “master regulator” by blocking tumor suppressor genes and so helping to set metastasis in motion. “Although the research is in its very early days, if we learn more about how this process works, we may in the future be able to generate drugs that block the triggering of metastatic disease,” says Sohail Tavazoie, senior author on the study, Leon Hess Assistant Professor, and head of the Elizabeth and Vincent Meyer Laboratory of Systems Cancer Biology. To pinpoint this protein, Tavazoie and his colleagues used a computer algorithm previously developed by first author Hani Goodarzi and co-author Saeed Tavazoie, a professor at Columbia University, to scan both the sequence and shape of RNA molecules in breast cancer cells. Only recently have cancer researchers begun to systematically look at the shapes of messenger RNA molecules, which encode instructions from DNA. …