Now a team of researchers led by Shaoxin Li at Guangdong Medical College in China has demonstrated the potential of a new, non-invasive method to screen for prostate cancer, a common type of cancer in men worldwide. …
The researchers tested a new approach to detecting bone loss in cancer patients by using calcium isotope analysis to predict whether myeloma patients are at risk for developing bone lesions, a hallmark of the disease. They believe they have a promising technique that could be used to chart the progression of multiple myeloma, a lethal disease that eventually impacts a patient’s bones. The method could help tailor therapies to protect bone better and also act as a way to monitor for possible disease progression or recurrence. “Multiple myeloma is a blood cancer that can cause painful and debilitating bone lesions,” said Gwyneth Gordon, an Associate Research Scientist in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, and co-lead author of the study…
The imaging system is known as desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DESI MS). The technique was developed by R. Graham Cooks, Ph.D., at Purdue University, and the brain study was done with collaborators at Harvard Medical School and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and is described in the June 30 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. DESI MS promises to be a significant improvement over the current method of distinguishing brain tumor tissue from healthy tissue, which relies on an extremely lengthy and difficult procedure for surgeons and patients…
Analyzing these modifications can provide important clues to the type of tumor a patient has, and how it will respond to different drugs. For example, patients with glioblastoma, a type of brain tumor, respond well to a certain class of drugs known as alkylating agents if the DNA-repair gene MGMT is silenced by epigenetic modification…
The BBB is a network of tight junctions that normally acts to protect the brain from foreign substances by preventing them from leaking out of blood vessels. However, it also limits the effectiveness of drugs to treat brain disease…
Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer type in the United States, and incidence rates are rising faster than those of any other cancer. It’s also the deadliest form of skin cancer, causing more than 75 percent of skin-cancer deaths…
In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sangeeta Bhatia of MIT and Charles Rice of Rockefeller University describe using microfabricated cell cultures to sustain hepatitis B virus in human liver cells, allowing them to study immune responses and drug treatments. …
Half of all lung cancer patients are over 70 years old when first diagnosed, but studies have shown that these older patients are less likely to receive an accurate diagnosis. A correct assessment of the stage of a patient’s disease — how much their tumor has grown and spread — is key to ensuring they receive the right treatment. Non-invasive methods of checking whether a patient’s cancer has spread to their lymph nodes have limited sensitivity and until recently the only way to obtain a tissue sample was under general anaesthetic — limiting its use in elderly patients who often present with other conditions that may restrict the use of general anaesthesia. …
With a new technique, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have established a new strategy to help surgeons see the entire tumor in the patient, increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome. This approach relies on an injectable dye that accumulates in cancerous tissues much more so than normal tissues…
The study also suggested that traditional methods of measuring the severity and possible spread of the cancer together with molecular techniques might, with further research, help to create personalized, cost-effective treatment regimens for prostate cancer patients who undergo the surgical procedure. The findings apply to men whose cancer has not spread beyond the prostate, and the results are comparable to the well-established and more invasive open surgery to remove the entire diseased prostate and some surrounding tissue. The research study is published this month online in European Urology, the official journal of the European Association of Urology. “Until our analysis, there was little available information on the long-term oncologic outcomes for patients who undergo robot-assisted radical prostatectomy, or RARP,” says Mireya Diaz, Ph.D., Director of Biostatistics at the Henry Ford’s Vattikuti Urology Institute (VUI) and lead author of the study…