Tag Archives: team

Medicaid reimbursements may affect cancer screening rates among beneficiaries — ScienceDaily

Although Medicaid is a joint state-federal government health insurance program, each state sets the policies for its own Medicaid program within requirements set by the federal government. This includes setting how much providers are paid for health care services and who is allowed to enroll in Medicaid. To determine whether state Medicaid eligibility and reimbursement policies affect receipt of breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening among Medicaid beneficiaries, Michael Halpern, MD, PhD, MPH, of RTI International, and his colleagues analyzed 2007 Medicaid data from 46 states and Washington DC. “Few studies have examined how state-specific differences in Medicaid policies might affect use of preventive care services, particularly for early detection of cancer,” said Dr…

Cellular biology of colorectal cancer: New Insight

Lead author Kristi Neufeld, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and co-leader of the Cancer Biology program at the KU Cancer Center, has spent the better part of her career trying to understand the various activities of APC, a protein whose functional loss is thought to initiate roughly 80 percent of all colon polyps, a precursor to colon cancer. Neufeld, along with her postdoctoral fellow Maged Zeineldin, undergraduate student Mathew Miller and veterinary pathologist Ruth Sullivan, now reports that APC found in a particular subcellular compartment, the nucleus, protects from inflammation as well as tumor development associated with chronic colitis. Whether APC reaches the nucleus may well affect the ability of intestinal stem cells to produce differentiated cells with specialized functions, Neufeld said. …

Immune cell discovery could help halt cancer spread

These natural killer cells could be harnessed to hunt down and kill cancers that have spread in the body. The team, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, also found natural killer cells were critical to the body’s rejection of donor bone marrow transplants and in the runaway immune response during toxic shock syndrome. The discoveries came after the team showed that a protein called MCL-1 was crucial for survival of natural killer cells, in research published today in the journal Nature Communications. The discovery will help to determine how natural killer cells can be manipulated to fight cancers and other disorders…

New ways to treat solid tumors using protein — ScienceDaily

As EphA3 is present in normal organs only during embryonic development but is expressed in blood cancers and in solid tumors, this antibody-based approach may be a suitable candidate treatment for solid tumors. The researchers from Monash University and Ludwig Cancer Research, in Australia, and KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, in the US, have had their findings published in the journal Cancer Research. The team, led jointly by the late Professor Martin Lackmann, from the School of Biomedical Sciences at Monash; and Professor Andrew Scott, from Ludwig Cancer Research, has found that even if tumor cells do not have this molecule they can thrive by recruiting and taking advantage of supporting EphA3-containing cells in the tumor micro-environment…

Cell plasticity may provide clues to origin of aggressive type of breast cancer — ScienceDaily

A team of researchers, led by Candice A.M. Sauder, M.D., while a resident at the Indiana University Department of Surgery, reported online in BMC Cell Biology that healthy breast cells separated from their normal environment were able to transform into types of cells similar to those seen in metaplastic carcinoma, a form of triple negative breast cancer. The team developed 12 cell lines from the normal, healthy breast tissue from volunteer donations to the Susan G…

Bladder cancer patients identified who could benefit from ‘tumor-softening’ treatment — ScienceDaily

“This fascinating new finding could help doctors adapt their treatments to patients with bladder cancer,” said Nell Barrie, Cancer Research UK The team from The University of Manchester, funded by the Medical Research Council, found that patients whose bladder tumor had high levels of a protein, called ‘HIF-1α’, were more likely to benefit from having carbogen — oxygen mixed with carbon dioxide gas — and nicotinamide tablets at the same time as their radiotherapy. The treatment, called ‘CON’, makes radiotherapy more effective. By comparing levels of HIF-1α in tissue samples from 137 patients who had radiotherapy on its own or with CON, the researchers found the protein predicted which patients benefited from having CON. High levels of the protein were linked to better survival from the disease when patients had radiotherapy and CON. …