A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published today in the journal Stem Cells shows it’s the latter: the progenitor cells that create MI bladder cancer are different than the progenitor cells that create NMI bladder cancer. Though these two cancers grow at the same site, they are different diseases…
Seven hundred patients treated for colorectal cancer at three Cancer Treatment Centers of America hospitals completed service quality questionnaires measuring their levels of satisfaction with hospital operations and services, physicians and staff, and contained patient endorsements. Overall patient experience was measured by asking, “Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your overall experience with the institution?” Survey responses were correlated with median patient survival time from survey completion…
The immune system’s strength is especially important in cancer surgery because surgical manipulation of a tumor may spread cancer cells. The immune system can be impaired by general anesthesia, the overall stress surgery places on the body and by post-surgical systemic opioid use. The study found better outcomes in radical prostatectomy patients who had general anesthesia supplemented with spinal or epidural delivery of a long-acting opioid such as morphine, than in those who received general anesthesia only. …
In the study, recently published in the online version of the journal Cancer Research, Fisher’s team found that forced expression of MDA-7/IL-24 (melanoma differentiation associated gene-7/interlukin-24) stimulates SARI (suppressor of AP-1, induced by interferon) expression in what is known as an autocrine/paracrine loop, which ultimately causes cancer cells to undergo a form of cell suicide known as apoptosis. Autocrine/paracrine loops occur when the expression of a particular gene or its encoded protein causes cells to secrete molecules that bind to surface receptors and force the expression of more of the same protein in an ongoing cycle…
Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors are classified into functional and nonfunctional tumors by hormone secretion and clinical symptoms. Functional PNETs are mainly represented by insulinoma, which secrete insulin independent of glucose and cause hypoglycemia. The major genetic alterations in insulinomas are still unknown. …
The new findings explain partially why cancer cells, unlike normal cells, fail to die as a result of DNA damaging insults, and how this mechanism causes new genetic mutations in cancer cells. This new information directly benefits cancer research. Now that scientists understand the repair mechanism, they are better equipped to develop drug therapies that specifically target cancerous cells. …
A new paper published by Cancer External Site describes approaches to pain measurement used in oncology clinical trials submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that are consistent with current FDA guidance principles. The purpose of the paper is to assist drug developers to include meaningful pain endpoints when designing cancer trials. "Measurement of pain and other symptoms is an essential part of cancer trials…
"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. …
"These are early results but they are promising, says the study’s lead author, Ayalew Tefferi, M.D. a hematologist at Mayo Clinic. "Some patients in our clinical trial taking imetelstat obtained dramatic responses and there have been some complete responses which is almost unheard of for drug therapy in this disease." Myelofibrosis is a chronic myeloid cancer in which bone marrow cells that produce blood cells develop and function abnormally. The result is the formation of scar tissue in the bone marrow (fibrosis), severe anemia that often requires transfusion, weakness, fatigue and an enlarged spleen and liver…
Malumbres’s group had previously discovered that the inactivation of another APC/C protein, Cdc20, prevented cell division. These results caught the attention of pharmaceutical companies, who are already developing the first inhibitors from the complex. …