Tag Archives: study

Young Puerto Rican women and their mothers know little about HPV, cervical cancer

According to the study published in Preventing Chronic Disease, a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HPV vaccination rates are low among Puerto Rican women. Fifty one percent of Puerto Rican girls aged 11 to 18 have started the 3-step vaccination process and only 21 percent have completed the series. “Our study is the first to provide insight into common psychosocial barriers affecting HPV vaccination in Puerto Rico,” said Mar�a E…

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. …

Triple-negative breast cancer patients should undergo genetic screening — ScienceDaily

“Clinicians need to think hard about screening all their triple-negative patients for mutations because there is a lot of value in learning that information, both in terms of the risk of recurrence to the individual and the risk to family members. In addition, there may be very specific therapeutic benefits of knowing if you have a mutation in a particular gene,” says Fergus Couch, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic and lead author of the study. The study found that almost 15 percent of triple-negative breast cancer patients had deleterious (harmful) mutations in predisposition genes. The vast majority of these mutations appeared in genes involved in the repair of DNA damage, suggesting that the origins of triple-negative breast cancer may be different from other forms of the disease. …

Triple-negative breast cancer patients should undergo genetic screening

“Clinicians need to think hard about screening all their triple-negative patients for mutations because there is a lot of value in learning that information, both in terms of the risk of recurrence to the individual and the risk to family members. In addition, there may be very specific therapeutic benefits of knowing if you have a mutation in a particular gene,” says Fergus Couch, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic and lead author of the study. The study found that almost 15 percent of triple-negative breast cancer patients had deleterious (harmful) mutations in predisposition genes. The vast majority of these mutations appeared in genes involved in the repair of DNA damage, suggesting that the origins of triple-negative breast cancer may be different from other forms of the disease. …

Antiangiogenic treatment improves survival rates in animal model of ovarian cancer

Now research in an animal model finds that a novel combination therapy, which couples low-dose chemotherapy with an antiangiogenic treatment, resulted in better survival rates compared with standard therapy. Led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the University of Guelph, the findings show that the agent, 3TSR, not only led to tumor regression, but also improved tumor blood flow and enabled more efficient delivery of much smaller and less toxic doses of chemotherapy. The study currently appears online in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and will be published in the February 2015 print issue. …

Novel regulatory mechanism for cell division found

A study, led by Zhimin Lu, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neuro-oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, showcased the non-metabolic abilities of PKM2 (pyruvate kinase M2) in promoting tumor cell proliferation when cells produce more of the enzyme. The study results were published in today’s issue of Nature Communications…

Why patients respond to a life-saving melanoma drug

The study, led by UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center members Drs. Paul Tumeh and Antoni Ribas, primary investigator of pembrolizumab, is the first of its kind since the FDA approved the use of Keytruda in September and could lead the way for more effective use of the drug in patients with melanoma and other cancers. A protein known as PD-1 puts the immune system’s brakes on, preventing T cells from attacking cancer cells. Pembrolizumab removes the brake lines, freeing up the immune system to kill cancer cells. …

Treatment breakthrough for advanced bladder cancer

Published today in Nature, the study examined an antibody (MPDL3280A) which blocks a protein (PD-L1) thought to help cancer cells evade immune detection. In a phase one, multi-centre international clinical trial, 68 patients with advanced bladder cancer (who had failed all other standard treatments such as chemotherapy) received MPDL3280A, a cancer immunotherapy medicine being developed by Roche. In addition, patients were all tested for the protein PD-L1 and around 30 were identified as having PD-L1 positive tumours. After six weeks of treatment, 43 per cent of PD-L1-positive patients found their tumour had shrunk…