The experimental vaccine, developed by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, prevented urinary tract infections associated with catheters, the tubes used in hospitals and other care facilities to drain urine from a patient’s bladder…
Directed by Dr. Guy Sauvageau, principal investigator at IRIC and hematologist at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital, the research has the potential to multiply by 10 the number of cord blood units available for a transplant in humans. …
“There is this group of people who think they don’t need to worry about getting cancer and believe they don’t have a high family risk of getting cancer, but unfortunately do,” said Mahon, a professor in internal medicine at Saint Louis University. Mahon says her requests for genetic testing for breast cancer have more than tripled since 2013, when actress Angelina Jolie announced she had a double mastectomy because she was at genetic risk of developing breast cancer. Older genetic screenings were for the BRCA 1 and 2 genes, which are linked to the development of breast, ovarian, prostate, melanoma, pancreatic and other cancers…
The study, led by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers, shows how in principle, radiation may specifically activate immune system cells responsible for attacking cancer cells, leading immune cells to “remember” how to fight cancer long after the cancer is gone. Andrew Sharabi, M.D., Ph.D., a resident in the Department of Radiation Oncology and Molecular Radiation Science at Johns Hopkins, is expected to present details of the study at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Society of Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) in San Francisco Sept. 15…
“For the first time, we have established that the genes controlling the length of these telomeres play a part in the risk of developing melanoma,” said lead author of the study Mark Iles, PhD, School of Medicine at the University of Leeds (UK). Telomeres are a part of the genome that function like the plastic caps of your shoelaces, which prevent the laces from fraying…
In a paper featured on the cover of the current issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Michigan State University researchers provide the first detailed examination of a set of mutations similar to those present in the human cancer gene, said Irina Pushel, MSU undergraduate and co-author. “By systematically evaluating mutations of increasing severity, we now have a model to better predict how we think the protein will react with each mutation,” said Pushel, who co-authored the paper with Liang Zhang, lead author and MSU graduate student, and Bill Henry and David Arnosti, MSU molecular biologists. …
The study, using a national database of more than 100,000 women treated during the last decade, found that today nationally radiation oncologists are less likely to use radiotherapy in women older than 70 with early-stage estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer and that when they do, treatment is appropriately less-intensive. This follows a randomized trial demonstrating low rates of recurrence in women who don’t receive radiotherapy after lumpectomy, provided they take endocrine therapy. This confirms radiation oncologists are responding to a growing impetus to keep medical practices current and cost-effective, said first author Charles Rutter, M.D., a radiation oncology resident in Yale’s School of Medicine. …
Specifically, the study examined a mutation-rich layer of the genome called the exome of 54 bladder tumors from primarily Caucasian patients. The study is the first to show alterations in the gene BAP1 in 15 percent of tumors; the gene is a likely tumor suppressor and so bladder cancers with alterations in this gene may be without an important check on the growth and survival of bladder cancer tissue…
Researchers analyzed data from 561 patients with high-risk prostate cancer from a multi-center, randomized phase III trial in Canada (PCS IV clinical trials, Gov. # NCT 00223171). …
The study examined the patient-reported outcomes of 91 men with prostate cancer who received MRI-guided, vessel-sparing radiation at University of Michigan Providence Cancer Institute. The vessel-sparing radiation technique limits the amount of radiation to critical erectile tissues using MRI scans to identify the blood vessels responsible for erections. When radiation dose is limited to these critical structures, the risk of erectile dysfunction is lowered. …