Tag Archives: university

New blood test determines whether you have or are likely to get cancer

“The test could allow earlier cancer detection, so helping to save peoples’ lives,” said Diana Anderson, a researcher involved in the work from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford in West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. To develop this test, Anderson and colleagues took blood samples from a group of people that included healthy individuals, cancer patients and people believed to be at a higher risk than normal to develop cancer…

Promising results shown with targeted approaches in subsets of non-small cell lung cancer

“Reports of lung cancers bearing mutations in BRAF have generated considerable interest because these mutations may be associated with increased sensitivity to BRAF tyrosine-kinase inhibiting agents,” says lead author Dr David Planchard, pulmonary oncologist at the Gustav-Roussy Cancer Campus, Paris, France. Planchard says studies suggest that activating BRAF mutations are present in around 2% of lung carcinomas — approximately 80% of which are V600E mutations. The BRAF V600E mutations are frequently associated with shorter disease-free, overall survival, and lower response rates to platinum-based chemotherapy. …

French studies measure benefits of colorectal cancer screening

Dr Vanessa Cottet from INSERM Unit� 866 in Dijon, France, and colleagues studied the region of C�te-d’Or, where a registry has been collecting data on adenomas since 1976. They wanted to evaluate the rate of diagnosis of adenomas before and after the initiation of a screening program using fecal occult blood testing that began in 2003…

Simple blood test could be used as tool for early cancer diagnosis

A simple blood test could identify those with hypercalcaemia, prompting doctors to investigate further. The research, published in the British Journal of Cancer, analysed the electronic records of 54,000 patients who had elevated levels of calcium and looked at how many of them went on to receive a cancer diagnosis. Dr Fergus Hamilton, who led the research from the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol, said: “All previous studies on hypercalcaemia and cancer had been carried out with patients who had already been diagnosed with cancer — hypercalcaemia was seen as a late effect of the cancer. “We wanted to look at the issue from a different perspective and find out if high calcium levels in blood could be used as an early indicator of cancer and therefore in the diagnosis of cancer.” Analysis of the data from 54,000 patients found that in men, even mild hypercalcaemia (2.6-2.8 mmol l−1) conferred a risk of cancer in one year of 11.5 per cent. …

Chemists recruit anthrax to deliver cancer drugs

“Anthrax toxin is a professional at delivering large enzymes into cells,” says Bradley Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubauch Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT. “We wondered if we could render anthrax toxin nontoxic, and use it as a platform to deliver antibody drugs into cells.” In a paper appearing in the journal ChemBioChem, Pentelute and colleagues showed that they could use this disarmed version of the anthrax toxin to deliver two proteins known as antibody mimics, which can kill cancer cells by disrupting specific proteins inside the cells…

New anti-cancer peptide vaccines and inhibitors developed — ScienceDaily

Two studies, published in the journal OncoImmunology, identify new peptide vaccines and inhibitors that target the HER-3 and IGF-1R receptors. All four agents elicited significant anti-tumor responses in human cancer cell lines and in animal models. The studies suggest that combining two peptide agents that target different cell receptors can significantly boost their effectiveness and might prevent or overcome the drug resistance that often occurs with standard single-drug treatments that target HER-2…

Immune system is key ally in cyberwar against cancer

“Recent research has found that cancer is already adept at using cyberwarfare against the immune system, and we studied the interplay between cancer and the immune system to see how we might turn the tables on cancer,” said Rice University’s Eshel Ben-Jacob, co-author of a new study this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ben-Jacob and colleagues at Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, developed a computer program that modeled a specific channel of cell-to-cell communication involving exosomes. Exosomes are tiny packets of proteins, messenger RNA and other information-coding segments that both cancer and immune cells make and use to send information to other cells…