Tag Archives: technique

Brain tumor removal through hole smaller than dime

Gavin Britz, MBBCh, MPH, FAANS, chairman of neurosurgery at Houston Methodist Neurological Institute, used a minimally-invasive technique to remove a vascular lesion from deep within the 44-year-old patient’s brain, the first to use this technique in the region. Traditionally, vascular lesions or brain tumors that are located deep within the brain can cause damage just by surgical removal. "With this new approach, we can navigate through millions of important brain fibers and tracts to access deep areas of the brain where these benign tumors or hemorrhages are located with minimal injury to normal brain," said Britz. "Ryan’s surgery took less than an hour." Houston Methodist neurosurgeons Britz and David Baskin, M.D., director of the Kenneth R. …

A simple test may catch early pancreatic cancer

The findings of their research, if confirmed, they say, could be an important step in reducing mortality from the cancer, which has an overall five-year survival rate of less than 5 percent and has seen few improvements in survival over the last three decades. "We have mammograms to screen for breast cancer and colonoscopies for colon cancer but we have had nothing to help us screen for pancreatic cancer," says Nita Ahuja, M.D., an associate professor of surgery, oncology and urology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study described online this month in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. …

Football-shaped particles bolster body’s defense against cancer

"The shape of the particles really seems to matter because the stretched, ellipsoidal particles we made performed much better than spherical ones in activating the immune system and reducing the animals’ tumors," according to Jordan Green, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a collaborator on this work. A summary of the team’s results was published online in the journal Biomaterials on Oct. 5. According to Green, one of the greatest challenges in the field of cancer medicine is tracking down and killing tumor cells once they have metastasized and escaped from a tumor mass…

Sieving through ‘junk’ DNA reveals disease-causing genetic mutations

The new method designed by the team, described in the journal Science, identified these variants in the under-explored regions of DNA that do not code for proteins, but instead influence activity of other genes. As even more whole genome sequences become available, this approach can be applied to find any potential disease-causing variant in the non-coding regions of the genome…

Nano-dissection identifies genes involved in kidney disease

A new method developed by researchers at Princeton University and the University of Michigan called "in silico nano-dissection" uses computers rather than scalpels to separate and identify genes from specific cell types, enabling the systematic study of genes involved in diseases. The team used the new method to successfully identify genes expressed in cells known as podocytes — the "work-horses" of the kidney — that malfunction in kidney disease. The investigators showed that certain patterns of activity of these genes were correlated with the severity of kidney impairment in patients, and that the computer-based approach was significantly more accurate than existing experimental methods in mice at identifying cell-lineage-specific genes…

New MR analysis technique reveals brain tumor response to anti-angiogenesis therapy

"Until now the only ways of obtaining similar data on the blood vessels in patients’ tumors were either taking a biopsy, which is a surgical procedure that can harm the patients and often cannot be repeated, or PET scanning, which provides limited information and exposes patients to a dose of radiation," says Kyrre Emblem, PhD, of the Martinos Center, lead and corresponding author of the report. "VAI can acquire all of this information in a single MR exam that takes less than two minutes and can be safely repeated many times." Previous studies in animals and in human patients have shown that the ability of anti-angiogenesis drugs to improve survival in cancer therapy stems from their ability to "normalize" the abnormal, leaky blood vessels that usually develop in a tumor, improving the perfusion of blood throughout a tumor and the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation. …

Researchers use nanoparticles to fight cancer

The findings were published recently in the early online edition of ACS Nano. The human body operates under a constant state of martial law. Chief among the enforcers charged with maintaining order is the immune system, a complex network that seeks out and destroys the hordes of invading bacteria and viruses that threaten the organic society as it goes about its work. The immune system is good at its job, but it’s not perfect. …

Scientists use genome sequencing to demonstrate herbal remedy causes upper urinary tract cancers

Aristolochic [pronounced a-ris-to-lo-kik] acid is found in the plant family "Aristolochia," a vine known widely as birthwort, and while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first warned of its cancer-causing potential in 2001, botanical products and herbal remedies containing it can still be purchased online. Moreover, the vine has been found to be an environmental carcinogen through the contamination of food supplies of farming villages in the Balkans, where Aristolochia grows wildly in the local wheat fields…

Injectable ‘smart sponge’ holds promise for controlled drug delivery

"We wanted to mimic the function of health beta-cells, which produce insulin and control its release in a healthy body," says Dr. Zhen Gu, lead author of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. …