July 16, 2008, 8:33 PM CT

Magnetic Nanoparticles to Combat Cancer

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a potential new therapy against cancer that attaches magnetic nanoparticles to cancer cells, allowing them to be captured and carried out of the body. The therapy, which has been tested in the laboratory and will now be looked at in survival studies, is detailed online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"We've been able to use magnetic nanoparticles to capture free-floating cancer cells and then take them out of the body," said John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute. "This technology may be of special importance in the therapy of ovary cancer where the malignancy is typically spread by free-floating cancer cells released from the primary tumor into the abdominal cavity."

The idea came to the research team from the work of Ken Scarberry, a Ph.D. student in Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Scarberry originally conceived of the idea as a means of extracting viruses and virally infected cells when his advisor, Chemistry professor John Zhang, had another idea. He asked if the technology could be applied to cancer. Scarberry suggested it might be an effective means of preventing cancer cells from spreading.

They began by testing the treatment on mice. After giving the cancer cells in the mice a fluorescent green tag and staining the magnetic nanoparticles red, they were able to apply a magnet and move the green cancer cells to the abdominal region......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 15, 2008, 9:18 PM CT

Vitamin A pushes breast cancer to form blood vessel cells

Scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have discovered that vitamin A, when applied to breast cancer cells, turns on genes that can push stem cells embedded in a tumor to morph into endothelial cells. These cells can then build blood vessels to link up to the body's blood supply, promoting further tumor growth.

They say their findings, reported in the July 16 online issue of PLoS ONE, is a proof of principle of the new and controversial "vasculogenic mimicry" theory, proposing that, as needed, tumors build their own blood pipelines. This is very different from the well-accepted role of tumor angiogenesis, when tumors send signals to blood vessels to grow toward the cancer.

The study's senior author, Stephen W. Byers, Ph.D., a professor of oncology and cell biology at Georgetown's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, also says that this study helps explain why retinoids-- natural or synthetic vitamin A agents--have had mixed results in treating cancer. "Finding that vitamin A may cause some breast cancer cells to form blood vessels brings up the rather disturbing notion that therapy with these drugs may actually stimulate tumor growth," says Byers.

For example, use of beta-carotene, the most important dietary precursor of vitamin A and the chemical that makes carrots orange, has been found to increase lung cancer progression in a large clinical trial. Additionally, fenretinide, a synthetic retinoid, appears to reduce the risk of second breast cancers in premenopausal women, but increase the risk in postmenopausal women, Byers says......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 14, 2008, 9:48 PM CT

Colorectal cancer screening rates still too low

Eventhough colorectal cancer screening tests are proven to reduce colorectal cancer mortality, only about half of U.S. men and women 50 and older receive the recommended tests, as per a report in the July 2008 issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a National Health Interview Survey and found only 50 percent of men and women 50 and older had received screening in 2005. Eventhough this was an improvement over the 43 percent of screened individuals reported in 2000, it is still far from optimal, researchers say.

"Colorectal cancer is one of the leading cancer killers in the United States, behind only lung cancer. Screening has been shown to significantly reduce mortality from colorectal cancer, but a lot of people are not yet getting screened," said Jean A. Shapiro, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Shapiro says a major problem appears to be insurance coverage. Among people without health insurance, scientists found the rate of colorectal cancer screening was 24.1 percent in comparison to over 50 percent of insured Americans, depending on the type of insurance. Among patients without a usual source of health care, the screening rate was 24.7 percent in comparison to 51.9 percent of patients with a usual source of health care......... Posted by: Sue      Read more         Source

July 10, 2008, 9:43 PM CT

Prostate cancer vaccines more effective with hormone therapy

Among patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer, the addition of hormone treatment following vaccine therapy improved overall survival compared with either therapy alone or when the vaccine followed hormone therapy, as per recent data reported in the July 15 Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Philip M. Arlen, M.D., director of the Clinical Research Group for the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology, Center for Cancer Research, at the National Cancer Institute, said the findings have important implications for guiding therapy decisions for patients with prostate cancer.

"Vaccines, if and when they are approved, can be safely and effectively combined with other therapies, including hormones," said Arlen. "There appears to be an advantage in overall survival".

Arlen and his colleagues enrolled 42 patients who had castration-resistant prostate cancer. These patients were randomly assigned to receive either a poxvirus-based prostate-specific antigen vaccine or hormone treatment with nilutamide. At progression, patients received the other treatment and continued to receive their original treatment.

For all the patients enrolled in the study, the three-year survival probability was 71 percent and the median overall survival was 4.4 years. Patients randomized to the vaccine had a three-year survival probability of 81 percent and an overall survival of 5.1 years, while patients taking nilutamide had a three-year survival probability of 62 percent and an overall survival of 3.4 years......... Posted by: Mark      Read more         Source

July 9, 2008, 9:16 PM CT

How food affects the brain

In addition to helping protect us from heart disease and cancer, a balanced diet and regular exercise can also protect the brain and ward off mental disorders.

"Food is like a pharmaceutical compound that affects the brain," said Fernando Gmez-Pinilla, a UCLA professor of neurosurgery and physiological science who has spent years studying the effects of food, exercise and sleep on the brain. "Diet, exercise and sleep have the potential to alter our brain health and mental function. This raises the exciting possibility that changes in diet are a viable strategy for enhancing cognitive abilities, protecting the brain from damage and counteracting the effects of aging." .

Gmez-Pinilla analyzed more than 160 studies about food's affect on the brain; the results of his analysis appear in the recent issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience and are available online at www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v9/n7/abs/nrn2421.html.

Omega-3 fatty acids found in salmon, walnuts and kiwi fruit provide a number of benefits, including improving learning and memory and helping to fight against such mental disorders as depression and mood disorders, schizophrenia, and dementia, said Gmez-Pinilla, a member of UCLA's Brain Research Institute and Brain Injury Research Center......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

July 9, 2008, 9:13 PM CT

A short and sweet diagnosis for cancer?

In order to provide the most effective therapys for cancer patients, it is essential to develop methods of sensitive and specific early detection of the disease. A team of researchers from the NIBRT Dublin-Oxford Glycobiology Laboratory at UCD has developed a system which aims to pinpoint potential "biomarkers" of early forms of the disease. They do this by looking at the structures of specific sugar molecules which are attached either to proteins made by malignant cells or to proteins involved in the host response. It is hoped that the availability of such cancer biomarkers would also allow disease progression and response to treatment to be monitored more accurately than is currently possible. Professor Pauline Rudd, who is leading the team, will be presenting some of their results on Thursday 10th July at the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting in Marseille [Session C4].

It is known that cancer cells not only have different sets of proteins from normal human cells, but that their proteins have changes in the types and numbers of sugar molecules that are attached to them. Dr Rudd and her colleagues think that being able to detect these changes holds the key to developing a new approach for diagnosing cancer. "We have observed that there are alterations in sugars attached to proteins in blood serum from all cancers we have looked at, and some of these appear to be early markers of the disease processes. What is more, we have been able to isolate several sugar-linked variants of particular proteins which are linked to different types of cancer, including prostate, pancreatic and ovarian and breast cancers," she reveals. "In the long term, we envisage that by finding more specific sugar variants, we will be able to use combinations of these as biomarkers to allow very accurate early diagnosis of particular cancers". These techniques could act alongside or even replace physical methods, such as scanning, which are less dependable for early diagnosis......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 9, 2008, 7:28 PM CT

Herceptin targets breast cancer stem cells

A gene that is overexpressed in 20 percent of breast cancers increases the number of cancer stem cells, the cells that fuel a tumor's growth and spread, as per a new study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The gene, HER2, causes cancer stem cells to multiply and spread, explaining why HER2 has been associated with a more aggressive type of breast cancer and to metastatic disease, in which the cancer has spread beyond the breast, the scientists say.

Further, the drug Herceptin, which is used to treat HER2-positive breast cancer, was found to target and destroy the cancer stem cells. Results of the study appear online in the journal Oncogene.

"This work suggests that the reason drugs that target HER2, such as Herceptin and Lapatanib, are so effective in breast cancer is that they target the cancer stem cell population. This finding provides further evidence for the cancer stem cell hypothesis," says study author Max S. Wicha, M.D., Distinguished Professor of Oncology and director of the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The cancer stem cell hypothesis says that tumors originate in a small number of cells, called cancer stem cells, and that these cells are responsible for fueling a tumor's growth. These cells represent fewer than 5 percent of the cells in a tumor. Wicha's lab was part of the team that first identified stem cells in human breast cancer in 2003......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 8, 2008, 8:49 PM CT

Young women's breast cancers have more aggressive genes

Young women's breast cancers tend to be more aggressive and less responsive to therapy than the cancers that arise in older women, and scientists at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy may have discovered part of the reason why: young women's breast cancers share unique genomic traits that the cancers in older women do not exhibit.

"Clinicians have long noted that the breast cancers we see in women under the age of 45 tend to respond less well to therapy and have higher recurrence rates than the disease we see in older women, especially those over the age of 65," said Kimberly Blackwell, M.D., a breast oncologist at Duke and senior investigator on the study. "Now we're really understanding why this is the case, and by understanding this, we may be able to develop better and more targeted therapies to treat these younger women".

The results appear in the July 10 Journal of Clinical Oncology The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Duke scientists looked at samples of nearly 800 breast tumors from women in five countries on three continents, and divided them into age-specific cohorts. The researchers found more than 350 sets of genes that were active only in the tumors from women under age 45. On the other hand, tumors arising in women over age 65 did not share these activated gene sets......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 8, 2008, 8:44 PM CT

Higher education and mortality reduction from cancers

Deaths due to the four most common cancerslung, colorectal, prostate, and breasthave dropped substantially in the United States from 1993 to 2001 in working-aged individuals. However, not all Americans are equally likely to benefit from those gains. A study reported in the July 8 online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute shows that more highly educated individuals had mortality reductions in nearly all of these cancers, while less educated individuals had a mortality reduction in only one of the cancer types.

In prior studies, scientists examined the impact of area-level socioeconomic status (SES) on cancer mortality trends and found an association between higher SES and bigger gains in mortality reduction. Investigators have not previously examined the association of individual SES components, such as education level, with cancer mortality.

In the current study, Ahmedin Jemal, D.V.M., Ph.D., of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues obtained individual education and mortality data from death certificates for non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks between the ages of 25 and 64 who died from one of the four major cancers between 1993 and 2001. The data are from the National Center for Health Statistics and cover approximately 86 percent of the U.S. population......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 8, 2008, 6:38 PM CT

Insect warning colors aid cancer drug discovery

Brightly colored beetles or butterfly larvae nibbling on a plant may signal the presence of chemical compounds active against cancer cell lines and tropical parasitic diseases, as per scientists at Smithsonian's Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Such clues could speed drug discovery and provide insight into the ecological relationships between tropical-forest plants and insects that feed on them. The report is reported in the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

"These findings are incredibly exciting and important," said Todd Capson, STRI research chemist, who directed the project. "The results of this study could have direct and positive impacts on the future of medical therapy for a number of diseases around the world".

For this research researchers used plants already known to have anti-cancer compounds; those proven to be active against certain disease-carrying parasites; and plants without such activity. The study showed that beetles and butterfly larvae with bright warning coloration were significantly more common on plants that contained compounds active against certain diseases, such as breast cancer and malaria. There was no significant difference in the number of plain-colored insects between plants with and without activity, as per the study by the Smithsonian's Panama International Cooperative Biodiversity Group Program......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 7, 2008, 9:56 PM CT

Can recycling be used to treat cancer?

We already know that recycling benefits our planet; and now new research suggests that the cellular version might be useful for battling cancer. Researchers at Stanford University have identified a molecule that uses this unexpected pathway to selectively kill cancer cells. The research, published by Cell Press in the July 8th issue of the journal Cancer Cell, may drive therapy strategies for cancer in an entirely new direction.

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the most common form of kidney cancer, is nearly always caused by mutation of the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor gene and often does not respond well to therapy.

"Since RCCs have a poor prognosis and are refractory to standard chemotherapies, there is a need to develop new therapies for kidney cancer," says senior author Dr. Amato J. Giaccia. Dr. Giaccia and his colleagues used a sophisticated screening procedure to search for molecules that could selectively destroy VHL-deficient kidney cancer.

"Specifically identifying and targeting the cancer cells, while leaving normal cells intact should have great therapeutic impact. Most side effects people associate with chemotherapy, such as nausea and hair loss, are due to toxic effects of drugs on normal tissues. Exploiting a feature of cancer cells should spare the normal tissue and decrease these awful side effects," explains Dr. Giaccia......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 2, 2008, 10:10 PM CT

Computers to hone cancer-fighting strategies

A Florida State University faculty member who uses computational techniques to evaluate a new class of cancer-killing drugs is attracting worldwide attention from other researchers.

Kevin C. Chen, an assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at the Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering, is using high-powered computers to determine how substances known as recombinant immunotoxins can best be modified in order to attack and kill cancerous tumors while doing minimal harm to a patient's healthy cells.

"Cancer is a disease of tremendous complexity, so the analysis and interpretation of data demands sophisticated, specialized computational methods," Chen said of his research.

Recombinant immunotoxins, Chen explained, are new drugs that are being tested in clinical trials for certain types of cancer treatment. They consist of tiny fragments of antibody proteins that are fused at the genetic level to toxins produced by certain types of bacteria, fungi or plants.

"Once injected into the body, the antibody portion of the immunotoxin targets specific proteins, called antigens, that are massively expressed on the surface of cancer cells," Chen said. "These cells are subsequently killed by the accompanying toxins. Normal, healthy cells, meanwhile, are not recognized and thus are spared"......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

July 1, 2008, 8:36 PM CT

Designer diet for prostate cancer

Eating one or more portions of broccoli every week can reduce the risk of prostate cancer, and the risk of localised cancer becoming more aggressive.

For the first time, a research group at the Institute of Food Research led by Professor Richard Mithen has provided an explanation of how eating broccoli might reduce cancer risk based upon studies in men, as opposed to trying to extrapolate from animal models. Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer for males in western countries. The research has provided an insight into why eating broccoli can help men stay healthy.

For the study, reported in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on July 2, men who were at risk of developing prostate cancer ate either 400g of broccoli or 400g of peaccording to week in addition to their normal diet over 12 months. Tissue samples were taken from their prostate gland before the start of the trial and after 6 and 12 months, and the expression of every gene measured using Affymetrix microarray technology.

It was observed that there were more changes in gene expression in men who were on the broccoli-rich diet than on the pea diet, and these changes may be linked to the reduction in the risk of developing cancer, that has been reported in epidemiological studies......... Posted by: Mark      Read more         Source

June 26, 2008, 9:22 PM CT

Promising cancer drug target in prostate tumors

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report they have blocked the development of prostate tumors in cancer-prone mice by knocking out a molecular unit they describe as a "powerhouse" that drives runaway cell growth.

In an article that is being published recently as an advanced online publication by the journal Nature, the scientists say the growth-stimulating molecule called p110beta -- part of a cellular signaling network disrupted in several common cancers -- is a promising target for novel cancer therapies designed to shut it down. The report's lead authors are Shidong Jia, MD, PhD, Zhenning Liu, PhD, Sen Zhang PhD, and Pixu Liu, MD, PhD.

The p110beta molecule and a counterpart, p110alpha, are "isoforms" -- slightly different forms of an enzyme called PI(3)K that is an intense focus of cancer research and drug development. PI(3)K is the linchpin of a cell-signal pathway that responds to growth factor signals from outside the cell.

When activated by growth factor receptors, PI(3)K turns on a cascade of genes and proteins that drives cells to divide and grow. The molecular accelerator is normally kept under control by a tumor-suppressor protein, PTEN, which acts like a brake to curb excess cell growth that could lead to cancer.

Mutations that inactivate PTEN -- in effect releasing the brake on growth signals -- are found in a significant proportion of prostate, breast and brain tumors. The senior authors of the new report, Jean Zhao, PhD, and Thomas Roberts, PhD, previously showed that blocking p110alpha protein inhibits malignant growth induced by various cancer-causing proteins, such as Her2 and EGFR. With that knowledge in hand, the researchers, in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies, are in the process of developing p110alpha blockers......... Posted by: Mark      Read more         Source

June 26, 2008, 8:48 PM CT

Higher Coffee Consumption: Lower Liver Cancer Risk

Higher Coffee Consumption Linked to Lower Liver Cancer Risk.

Liver Cancer is the Third Most Common Global Cause of Cancer Death.

A new large, prospective population-based study confirms an inverse relationship between coffee consumption and liver cancer risk. The study also observed that higher levels of gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT) in the blood were linked to an increased risk of developing the disease. These findings appear in the recent issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD). The article and an accompanying editorial are also available online at Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com).

Scientists led by Gang Hu at the University of Helsinki set out to examine the associations between coffee consumption and serum GGT with the risk of liver cancer in a large prospective cohort. Residents of Finland drink more coffee per capita than the Japanese, Americans, Italians, and other Europeans, so Hu and his colleagues studied 60,323 Finnish participants ages 25 to 74 who were cancer-free at baseline. The Finns were included in seven independent cross-sectional population surveys conducted between 1972 and 2002 and followed up through June 2006......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

June 23, 2008, 7:13 PM CT

Anticancer agents on patients with heart disease

A set of promising new anticancer agents could have unforeseen risks in individuals with heart disease, suggests research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The anticancer drugs which go by the strange name of hedgehog antagonists interfere with a biochemical process that promotes growth in some cancer cells. But the scientists showed that interfering with this biochemical process in mice with heart disease led to further deterioration of cardiac function and ultimately death.

"This finding should serve as a warning that these drugs might have adverse effects on the heart and that it could be very important to monitor patients' cardiovascular health when using this type of anticancer drug," says senior author David Ornitz, M.D., Ph.D., the Alumni Endowed Professor and head of Developmental Biology. The research was reported June 20, 2008, in advance online publication in the Journal of Clinical Investigation

Hedgehog antagonists are drugs that inhibit the hedgehog signaling pathway, a chain of biochemical signals that regulate cellular growth and differentiation. The odd term hedgehog has little to do with the small, spiny mammals it originated when researchers noted the spiky, hedgehog-like appearance of fly embryos with abnormal hedgehog genes. Every organism in the animal kingdom has hedgehog genes, which play an essential role in guiding cells to mature into the appropriate form for proper function......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

June 23, 2008, 7:10 PM CT

Idle Computers Offer Hope

A biomedical engineering professor at The University of Texas at Austin is using a concept called "grid computing" to allow the average person to donate idle computer time in a global effort to fight cancer.

Muhammad Zaman, assistant professor in biomedical engineering, recently introduced Cellular Environment in Living Systems @Home or CELS@Home for short. The program already has more than 1,000 computer users worldwide contributing to the project. And the numbers keep growing.

The idea is based on what is called grid computing. Instead of using local computing resources, which are almost always limited, grid computing allows Internet users worldwide to contribute their idle computer time, creating a "virtual" supercomputer to solve a difficult problem. In this case, the grid computing program is calculating cellular interactions in different environments to help understand the principles of cell migration and cancer cell metastasis, or the spread of cancer from the original tumor to other parts of the body.

"We have launched a global effort to recreate the in vivo (live) environment of cancer cells in a computer model. This allows us to perform virtual experiments and study processes that are too costly or technically very difficult to study," says Zaman, who also directs the Laboratory for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics. "By recreating this whole 'system of processes inside a cancer cell' we will be in a position to fully comprehend the problem and hopefully identify targets that will one day translate into anti-cancer drugs"......... Posted by: Scott      Read more         Source

June 19, 2008, 10:20 PM CT

On the path to personalized medicine

Medicine has moved a little bit closer to the era of tailor-made therapys, based on the unique genetic profiles of individual patients, as per recent research conducted by Dr Rima Rozen of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) at the Montreal Children's Hospital and McGill University. Her study, published June 18 in the journal Pharmacogenetics and Genomics, shows how minor genetic differences between individuals alter the way a common drug affects the body.

Rozen has measured the impact of Methotrexate -- a drug that inhibits the metabolism of folate -- on mice with an altered MTHFR gene, which is a gene crucial for folate metabolism. The results were striking: after therapy with Methotrexate, mice with the altered gene had approximately 20 per cent less hemoglobin and red blood cells than their counterparts with non-altered genes. The altered mice also showed increased susceptibility to liver and kidney damage following therapy.

"We know that these results are applicable to humans because a parallel mutation in the human MTHFR gene affects human folate metabolism similarly. The results demonstrate that medicine affects subjects differently as per individual genetic traits," Dr. Rozen explained. "And tests exist to detect this mutation." Genetic testing would allow physicians the modify therapy based on each patient's personal genetic makeup, limiting potential side effects......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

June 19, 2008, 10:18 PM CT

Weight-loss surgery can cut cancer risk

Successful bariatric surgery allows morbidly obese patients to lose up to 70 percent of their excess weight and to maintain weight loss. The latest study by Dr. Nicolas Christou of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and McGill University shows that this surgery also decreases the risk of developing cancer by up to 80 percent. Dr. Christou presented his preliminary results yesterday at the 25th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery.

The scientists compared 1,035 morbidly obese patients who underwent bariatric surgery at the MUHC between 1986 and 2002 with 5,746 patients with the same weight profile who did not undergo the operation. The number of cancer diagnoses in first group was 85 percent lower for breast cancer and 70 percent lower for colon and pancreas cancers, and was also distinctly lower for several other types of cancer.

"The relationship between obesity and a number of forms of cancer is well established," said Dr. Christou. "This is one of the first studies to suggest that bariatric surgery might prevent the risk of cancer for a significant percentage of morbidly obese people".

Obesity affects the body in multiple ways, so a single hypothesis cannot fully explain these results, say the researchers. However, excess body fat is widely believed to be responsible for increased hormone production, a major risk factor for breast and colon cancer. Thus so modifications to the patient's hormonal metabolism due to weight loss might explain the lower occurence rate of these cancers in patients who underwent surgery......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

June 19, 2008, 10:16 PM CT

Math could help cure leukemia

When kids complain that math homework won't help them in real life, a new answer might be that math could help cure cancer.

In a recent study that combined math and medicine, scientists have shown that patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) may be cured of the disease with an optimally timed cancer vaccine, where the timing is determined based on their own immune response.

In the June 20 edition of the journal PLoS Computational Biology, University of Maryland associate professor of mathematics Doron Levy, Stanford Medical School doctor and associate professor of medicine (hematology) Peter P. Lee, and Dr. Peter S. Kim, cole Suprieure d'lectricit (Gif-sur-Yvette, France) describe their success in creating a mathematical model which predicts that anti-leukemia immune response in CML patients using the drug imatinib can be stimulated in a way that might provide a cure for the disease.

"By combining novel biological data and mathematical modeling, we found rules for designing adaptive therapys for each specific patient," said Levy, of the University of Maryland Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling. "Give me a thousand patients and, with this mathematical model, I can give you a thousand different customized therapy plans"......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

June 18, 2008, 9:02 PM CT

Understanding Of Cell Behaviour In Breast Cancer

The invasion and spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body, known as metastasis, is a principal cause of death in patients diagnosed with breast cancer. Eventhough patients with early stage, small, breast tumours have an excellent short term prognosis, more than 15 to 20 per cent of them will eventually develop distant metastases, and die from the disease. Vascular invasion - through lymphatic and blood vessels - is the major route for cancer spreading to regional lymph nodes and to the rest of the body.

Dr Stewart Martin, Professor Ian Ellis and their colleagues at The University of Nottingham, and worldwide, are combining many approaches in a dynamic effort to improve our understanding of cell behaviour in breast cancer. Discovering how these cells operate is vital in improving diagnosis and therapy for the cancer patient in the longer term, and in identifying therapeutic targets. Already the results of their work have been excellent - with findings in relation to the spread of cancer through the lymphatic vessels prompting a much larger study funded by Cancer Research UK.

A research student within the Nottingham team, Rabab Mohammed, showed recently that specific factors that regulate the growth of blood and lymphatic vessels can identify a subset of tumours which have a high probability of recurring or spreading......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

June 17, 2008, 9:42 PM CT

Inherited melanoma risk: What you do know?

Salt Lake CityWhen people know the results of genetic tests confirming they have inherited an increased risk of developing melanoma, they follow skin cancer screening recommendations more proactivelymuch like those who have already been diagnosed with the potentially deadly disease, as per results of a study completed at the University of Utah's Huntsman Cancer Institute. and reported in the recent issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention

Tests for mutations in the CDKN2A gene can reveal a reason that melanomas "run" in families. The study reviewed the intent to follow, and the actual practice of, skin cancer early detection methods by members of families that carry CDKN2A gene mutations. Study participants were drawn from a group of Utahns who participated in the original "CDKN2A gene hunt" 10 to 12 years ago. They already knew that their family history might put them at increased risk for melanoma, and they had previously received melanoma prevention and screening education.

The results showed that people who tested positive for the CDKN2A mutation followed melanoma screening recommendations more carefully than before, even if they had not had a melanoma. In addition, knowing the test results did not lead family members without the mutation to decrease their screening measures......... Posted by: George      Read more         Source