Clinical sequencing technology identifies new targets in diverse cancers
FGFR genes are receptors that bind to members of the fibroblast growth factor family of proteins and play a role in key biological processes of a human cell. …
FGFR genes are receptors that bind to members of the fibroblast growth factor family of proteins and play a role in key biological processes of a human cell. …
"New treatment approaches are very much needed for children with high-risk childhood cancers; that is, those that are metastatic at diagnosis and likely to recur," says senior study author Kimberly Stegmaier of the Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center and the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. "By focusing on an alternative strategy to treating neuroblastoma tumors, we identified a compound class that in early testing in neuroblastoma cells in the laboratory shows promise for treating children with this disease." Beyond the standard approach of using drugs that kill tumor cells, another promising strategy is to identify compounds that promote differentiation, which causes tumor cells to stop dividing and growing. But the benefits of differentiation therapy had not been fully explored. …
"With better knowledge of this protein, we can better determine a patient’s prognosis and see who needs more aggressive treatment immediately and who can be given a milder treatment without a risk to their life. We can see at an early stage which patients are in the risk zone for cancer recurrence," said Karolina Boman, a doctoral student at the Division of Pathology at Lund University…