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Decades of research: Effectiveness of phone counseling for cancer patients still unknown

“The answer is that we really don’t know yet,” says Sonia Okuyama, MD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and the paper’s first author. The small sample sizes of most studies, focus on non-Hispanic white patients (predominantly in breast cancer), varied design of the phone interventions offered, and lack of consistency in adhering to reporting guidelines means that despite a high number of published studies, few definitive findings are possible…

A switch to dampen malignancy

“We were trying to identify molecular switches that control the plasticity of epithelial cells,” says Ludwig Oxford director Xin Lu, who led the study with Yajun Guo of The Second Military Medical University in Shanghai, China. “Such plasticity is a hallmark of cancer. In order to metastasize, a settled cancer cell must loosen its structure, wiggle free from its confines, travel to another part of the body and, once there, settle down to form a colony…

New drug could help in battle against cervical cancer

A Cancer Research UK-funded UK study led by researchers at the University of Leicester, with key collaborators from the Universities of Glasgow, Manchester and Edinburgh, has discovered that adding the investigational agent cediranib, which has been developed by the multinational pharmaceutical and biologics company AstraZeneca, to standard chemotherapy may be beneficial for patients with metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer and could pave the way for future treatment of the disease. Professor Paul Symonds from the Department of Cancer Studies and Molecular Medicine at the University of Leicester and a consultant at Leicester’s Hospitals, explained: “Cancers develop their own blood supply and cancers of the cervix with a well-developed blood supply can have a particularly bad outcome for the patient. “One of the substances which increase new blood vessels in cervical cancer is Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF). The experimental drug cediranib blocks the receptor for VEGF in the cancer, potentially limiting its growth in the body. …

Two-color barcodes: Dynamic duo to fight crime, cancer

So-called lanthanide-doped upconversion materials are highly promising for applications against crime and cancer as they have adjustable morphologies and tunable output wavelengths — they can also be fabricated by inexpensive processes that are easily scaled up. To date, single-crystal nanocrystals made from these materials have been impractical as multicolor barcodes because their tiny size makes them too small to be observed using conventional optical microscopes. …

Cancer patients should not hesitate to speak with their doctors about dietary supplements

This gap in communication can happen when patients believe that their doctors are indifferent or negative toward their use of these supplements. As a result, patients may find information about dietary supplements from unreliable sources, exposing themselves to unneeded risks. Since information on these dietary supplements is limited, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch describe a practical patient-centered approach to managing dietary supplement use in cancer care in a review article. Improving the communication between patient and doctor in this area is critical. …

Findings point to an ‘off switch’ for drug resistance in cancer

Now, scientists at the Salk Institute have uncovered details about how cancer is able to become drug resistant over time, a phenomenon that occurs because cancer cells within the same tumor aren’t identical — the cells have slight genetic variation, or diversity. The new work, published October 20 in PNAS, shows how variations in breast cancer cells’ RNA, the molecule that decodes genes and produces proteins, helps the cancer to evolve more quickly than previously thought. These new findings may potentially point to a “switch” to turn off this diversity — and thereby drug resistance — in cancer cells. …