"Normally, this pathway is responsible for senescence and suppressing proliferation of B cells," said Hong Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of cell & developmental biology at UMMS and senior author of the study. "However, human DLBCL show low levels of Smurf2 expression; these low levels affect a pathway that encourages un-checked cell division and tumor growth. …
Researchers at Princeton University have found that microRNAs — small bits of genetic material capable of repressing the expression of certain genes — may serve as both therapeutic targets and predictors of metastasis, or a cancer’s spread from its initial site to other parts of the body. The research was published in the journal Cancer Cell. …
The team’s findings are published in the Oct. 15 issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association of Cancer Research…
EBV causes infectious mononucleosis and cancers such as Hodgkin’s lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, which is the most common cancer in China, as well as opportunistic cancers in people with weakened immune systems. A member of the herpes virus family that remains in the body for life, the virus infects epithelial cells in the throat and immune cells called B cells. The researchers discovered that the virus triggers molecular events that turn off key proteins, making infected cells invisible to the natural killer T (NKT) immune cells that seek and destroy EBV-infected cells. "If you can force these invisible proteins to be expressed, then you can render infected cells visible to NKT cells, and defeat the virus. …
The group has discovered that the Cdkn1a/p21 gene is essential for maintaining the brain stem cells active and functional. Its absence causes depletion of these cells, impairing their functioning and affecting the generation of new neurons, as it occurs at the end of our lives…
TCGA ganged up on glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most common and lethal of brain tumors, with more than 100 scientists from 14 institutions tracking down the genomic abnormalities that drive GBM. …
The disease is typically diagnosed through an invasive and complicated biopsy. But a discovery by researchers at the UCLA School of Dentistry may be one major step toward creating a noninvasive tool that would enable clinicians and oncologists to detect pancreatic cancer through a simple risk assessment test using saliva. In a study on a tumor-ridden mouse model, the UCLA researchers were able to definitively validate that pancreatic cancer biomarkers reside in saliva…
"Doctors are looking for new ways to accurately predict prostate cancer patients’ prognoses, because the current methods that use disease stage, Gleason score, and PSA are not perfect," says Alan Meeker, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and its Kimmel Cancer Center. "Telomere shortening is common in cancer, but the degree of shortening varies from one cancer cell to another within each patient, and this variability may give us a better idea of how prostate cancers behave." In the study, described in the October issue of Cancer Discovery, the scientists studied tissue samples from 596 men surgically treated for prostate cancer thought to be confined to the prostate and who were participants in a long-term follow-up study on men’s health. …
The findings by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center — Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J…
The new study showed the drug candidate — known as FRAX97 — slowed the proliferation and progression of tumor cells in animal models of Neurofibromatosis type 2. This inherited type of cancer, caused by mutations in the anti-tumor gene NF2, leads to tumors of the auditory nerve that connects the inner ear to the brain…