Tag Archives: study

Prostate cancer, kidney disease detected in urine samples on the spot

But a cunningly simple new device can stop that vital information from “going to waste.” Brigham Young University chemist Adam Woolley and his students made a device that can detect markers of kidney disease and prostate cancer in a few minutes. All you have to do is drop a sample into a tiny tube and see how far it goes. That’s because the tube is lined with DNA sequences that will latch onto disease markers and nothing else. Urine from someone with a clean bill of health would flow freely through the tube (the farther, the better)…

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. …

Breast Cancer Tumor Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy measured — ScienceDaily

Breast cancer is the most common non-skin cancer in women worldwide, and the second leading cause of women’s cancer mortality in the United States. A common treatment strategy after diagnosis is to shrink breast cancer tumors larger than 3 centimeters with a 6- to 8-month course of NAC prior to surgery. Clinical studies have shown that patients who respond to NAC have longer disease-free survival rates, but only 20 to 30 percent of patients who receive NAC fit this profile…

Early palliative care can cut hospital readmissions for cancer patients

The Duke researchers shared their findings at the Palliative Care in Oncology Symposium sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In the new treatment model, medical oncologists and palliative care physicians partnered in a “co-rounding” format to deliver cancer care for patients admitted to Duke University Hospital’s solid tumor unit. The Duke model fostered collaboration and communication between the specialists, who met several times a day to discuss patient care…

Years after treatment for HER2-positve early stage breast cancer, trastuzumab continues to show life-altering benefit

They found that the use of trastuzumab produced a 37 percent improvement in survival and a 40 percent reduction in risk of cancer occurrence, compared to patients treated with chemotherapy alone. These findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, demonstrate how important trastuzumab has been to the treatment of this form of breast cancer, says the study’s lead author, Edith A. Perez, M.D., deputy director at large, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and director of the Breast Cancer Translational Genomics Program at Mayo Clinic in Florida…

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. …