Tag Archives: spain

Approved breast cancer drug offers hope for the treatment of blood disorders

“Our study demonstrates that targeting estrogen signaling with a clinically approved drug, at doses with an acceptable toxicity profile in humans, provides a novel potential therapeutic strategy for a set of neoplasms currently without a definitive cure,” said senior study author Sim�n M�ndez-Ferrer of the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) in Madrid, Spain. Myeloproliferative neoplasms cause large numbers of abnormal white blood cells to be produced and enter the bloodstream, potentially causing life-threatening symptoms. These diseases can lead to cancer and arise from blood cells called hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs), which give rise to all of the other blood cells. …

Galeterone shows activity in a variant form of castration-resistant prostate cancer — ScienceDaily

Associate professor Mary-Ellen Taplin, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA, will tell the 26th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Barcelona, Spain,�that galeterone was well tolerated by patients in the ARMOR2 trial, and also lowered PSA levels in a subset of men with CRPC that was resistant to other drugs that target the cancer, such as enzalutamide and abiraterone. “Recent data have shown that a variant of the androgen receptor called AR-V7, found in tumour cells circulating in the blood of patients with metastatic CRPC, predicted resistance to treatment with enzalutamide and abiraterone,” she will say. “Indeed, we believe AR-V7 and other, related variants are a mechanism of resistance in this disease and patients who have them may have a poorer prognosis.” Researchers believed that galeterone could be effective against CRPC because it disrupts the androgen receptor signalling pathways that are involved in the cancer, and preclinical work has shown it is active against the AR-V7 variant…

How radiotherapy kills cancer cells

Dr Jason Greenwood from Queen’s Centre for Plasma Physics collaborated with academics from Italy and Spain on the work on electrons, which has been published in the international journal Science. Using some of the shortest laser pulses in the world, the researchers used strobe lighting to track the ultra-fast movement of the electrons within a nanometer-sized molecule of amino acid. The resulting oscillations — lasting for 4,300 attoseconds (billion-billionths of a second) — amount to the fastest process ever observed in a biological structure. …

Chemotherapy: Rolapitant reduces nausea and vomiting in phase III trial

Dr Martin Chasen, lead author and medical director, Palliative Care, Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre, Canada, said: “This agent makes a significant difference in the way people tolerate their chemotherapy. Patients experienced no loss in quality of life and, in fact, many saw meaningful improvements. One of the patients in the rolapitant cohort reported that he had just finished 18 holes of golf one week after receiving chemotherapy…

Customizing chemotherapy in lung cancer: New phase II data reported

In a randomized phase II study, researchers showed that patients whose lung cancers expressed low levels of an enzyme called thymidylate synthase experienced a greater benefit from treatment with the combination of pemetrexed and cisplatin than those whose tumours expressed high levels. “Thymidylate synthase is one of the proteins that is targeted by pemetrexed which is the most widely used chemotherapeutic regimen in the treatment of non-squamous NSCLC,” explains study author Professor Myung-Ju Ahn, from the Section of Hematology-Oncology at Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea. “In this study, we tried to evaluate whether expression of thymidylate synthase is a predictive factor for response to pemetrexed plus cisplatin chemotherapy compared with gemcitabine plus cisplatin in non-squamous cell lung cancer patients.” In terms of response rate and progression-free survival, the clinical benefits of the pemetrexed combination compared to other regimen were more prominent in those patients who expressed low levels of the molecule, Ahn said…

Adding cediranib to chemotherapy improves progression-free survival for metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer, phase II trial shows

In Europe, about 70% of patients with cervical cancer are cured by either surgery or chemo-radiotherapy. Those patients with recurrent or secondary cancer have a very poor outlook. Only about 20-30% have tumour shrinkage after conventional chemotherapy and survival is usually less than one year. In the phase II CIRCCa trial, researchers compared two groups of patients with relapsed or metastatic cervical cancer given conventional chemotherapy with carboplatin and paclitaxel plus either cediranib (34 patients) or an identical looking placebo tablet (35 patients). …

Urine HPV test could offer non-invasive alternative to conventional smear, improve screening uptake

Current screening by cervical cytology (smear test) is invasive and time-consuming — and in recent years, cervical screening in the UK has fallen below 80%, particularly amongst women aged 25-30. Several studies have suggested that detecting HPV in urine may be a feasible alternative to cervical sampling, but the accuracy of such a test is still uncertain. …

Possible pathway for inhibiting liver, colon cancer found

The international team from CIC bioGUNE, the University of Liverpool and the US research centre USC-UCLA has successfully unravelled the mechanism by which two proteins, MATα2 and MATβ, bind to each other, thereby promoting the reproduction of tumour cells in liver and colon cancers. The study was announced in the latest issue of the open access journal IUCrJ published by the IUCr. This structural data discovery opens up additional research opportunities into drugs that can act on the binding of these proteins, thereby possibly inhibiting cancer cell growth. …