During radiation therapy for brain cancer, progenitor cells that later mature to produce the protective myelin coating around neurons are lost or significantly depleted, and there is no treatment available to restore them. These myelinating cells–called oligodendrocytes–are critical for shielding and repairing the brain’s neurons throughout life. …
The impact of soy consumption on breast cancer prevention and treatment is not clear although many women believe soy supplementation is beneficial based primarily on results from epidemiological studies. Moshe Shike, M.D., from the Department of Medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, NY, and colleagues conducted a randomized placebo-controlled study of the effects of soy supplementation on gene expression and markers of breast cancer risk among women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. The study, run between 2003 and 2007 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, enrolled a total of 140 patients who were randomized to either soy supplementation (soy protein) or placebo (milk protein), which lasted from the initial surgical consultation to the day before surgery (range=7-30 days)…
“Right now, we don’t know who, we don’t know when, and we don’t know why people develop brain tumors,” said Elizabeth M. Wilson, MNA, President and CEO, American Brain Tumor Association. “It’s frustrating for the brain tumor community, and it’s why the American Brain Tumor Association funds research to pursue answers to these questions, and it’s why we host this national conference to provide answers families desperately seek.” At the American Brain Tumor Association (ABTA) annual Patient and Family Conference in Chicago, July 25-26, Jill Barnholtz-Sloan, PhD, Associate Professor, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, will be the keynote speaker and provide an update on possible causes and risk factors for brain tumors. As Dr. …
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140722130654.htm
"With current techniques, we would typically have to grow pluripotent stem cell-derived cells for 60 or more years in order to model a late-onset disease," says senior study author Lorenz Studer of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. "Now, with progerin-induced aging, we can accelerate this process down to a period of a few days or weeks. This should greatly simplify the study of many late-onset diseases that are of such great burden to our aging society." Modeling a specific patient’s disease in a dish is possible with iPSC approaches, which involve taking skin cells from patients and reprogramming them to embryonic-like stem cells capable of turning into other disease-relevant cell types like neurons or blood cells. But iPSC-derived cells are immature and often take months to become functional, similar to the slow development of the human embryo. …
"We’re in uncharted territory," said study author Kenneth Offit, MD, MPH, Chief of the Clinical Genetics Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. "At the very least this discovery gives us a new window into inherited causes of childhood leukemia. More immediately, testing for this mutation may allow affected families to prevent leukemia in future generations." The mutation was first observed in a family treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering of which several family members of different generations had been diagnosed with childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). A second, non-related, leukemia-prone family cared for at a different hospital was later found to have the same mutation…