Results tagged “cancer” from Cancer

Scientists surveying the human genome have found that many more gene mutations drive the development of cancer than previously thought.

The survey is reported in the journal Nature.

In the largest survey of its kind, an international team comprising over 60 scientists from the UK, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Belgium, USA and Australia, working for the Cancer Genome Project, examined more than 500 genes and 200 cancers and sequenced more than 250 million letters of DNA code.

They found about 120 new genes that drive the development of cancer cells.

People at average risk for colon cancer shouldn't take aspirin or painkillers like ibuprofen to try to prevent the disease, a federal task force advises, because of the risk of bleeding and other potential health problems.

The recommendation for the first time by the US Preventive Services Task Force includes those with a family history of colorectal cancer.

The panel said that potential risks of taking more than 300 milligrams a day of aspirin or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen and naproxen - brand names include Motrin, Advil and Aleve - include a higher risk for stroke, intestinal bleeding or kidney failure.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc is preparing for a "renaissance" of its oncology business, led by Tykerb, a novel pill that is expected to win U.S. regulatory approval for breast cancer next month.

Oncology head Paolo Paoletti said Monday's launch of a Phase III study in head and neck cancer underlined Tykerb's potential in more tumor types, while four additional cancer medicines could win a marketing green light by 2010.

"We have five drugs that can be approved in the next few years," Paoletti said in an interview.

"If you compare that with the leaders in the field, Roche and Novartis, they have each had four drugs approved in 10 years.

I invite you to explore Sylicon Valle Moms Blog.

Not only these women describe what's happening in their lives as many other people do nowdays, SV moms are touching some sensitive and important topics, such as how to deal with the tragic news like having a cancer.

Read the article - It Happens. It's true that it's tough to talk about cancer, but it happens. Sharing the experience is important. So, give this article a read.

When cells become cancerous, they also become 100 times more likely to genetically mutate than regular cells, researchers have found. The findings may explain why cells in a tumor have so many genetic mutations, but could also be bad news for cancer treatments that target a particular gene controlling cancer malignancy.

The research was led by Dr. Lawrence Loeb, professor of pathology and biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Loeb presented his research Feb. 18 at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

AUSTRALIAN researchers have discovered a new way that cancer can be passed down from parents to children that will allow them to diagnose the disease earlier.

Previously researchers believed young cancer sufferers inherited a parent's gene mutation.
However doctors were at a loss to explain why tests showed no sign of genetic mutation in some people with cancer.

Now researchers from St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney and the University of New South Wales have discovered that a chemical which paralyses part of the body's DNA can also be passed down from parents to children and cause cancer.

Science Daily — Cancer cells are sick, but they keep growing because they don't react to internal signals urging them to die. Now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found an efficient way to get a messenger into cancer cells that forces them to respond to death signals. And they did it using one of the most sinister pathogens around — HIV.

"HIV knows how to insert itself into many different types of cells," says senior author William G. Hawkins, M.D., assistant professor of surgery and a member of the Siteman Cancer Center at the School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "A portion of the HIV protein called TAT can transport biologically active compounds into cells. TAT is small, but it can move massive molecules. You could almost hook TAT up to a train, and TAT would drag it inside a cell. So we've taken advantage of this ability."

Newswise — In the past couple of years, researchers at Oncolytics Biotech have been developing a harmless virus as a potent cancer killer, but they have also been accumulating data that suggests in addition to directly killing tumor cells, the reovirus may prime the immune system to mount a separate, powerful and long lasting defence against cancer.

Evidence for this theory has been mounting for the past year. On January 10, 2007, Dr. Sheila Fraser of St. James' University Hospital in Leeds, U.K. delivered a paper at the Society of Academic & Research Surgery Conference in Cambridge, U.K., in which she described a test tube experiment further supporting this claim.

Fraser’s presentation, titled “Reovirus as a Potentially Immunogenic as well as Cytotoxic Therapy for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer,” reported how cells taken from a colorectal cancer liver metastases were more susceptible to death many weeks after treatment with reovirus, and long after the virus had cleared the patient’s system. These cells, when cultured in the laboratory, also appeared to be vulnerable to re-infection with reovirus. Moreover, Dr. Fraser noted that dendritic cells, which prime the immune system against cancer, were activated by exposure to the reovirus.

Diagnosed cases of cancer rose by 10 percent in Europe over two years, an increase attributable to the continent's ageing population, the effects of smoking and better screening for breast cancer, doctors reported.

In 2006, there were 3.2 million new cases of cancer in 39 European countries, compared with 2.9 million in 2004, they said.

For the first time, breast cancer overtook lung cancer as the commonest diagnosed cancer, with 429,000 new cases in 2006, or nearly one in seven of the total.

Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realized she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment.

Schaefer and colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York believe they have discovered a new way to attack tumors that have learned how to evade existing drugs.

Tests in mice suggest the compound helps break down the cell walls of tumors, almost like destroying a tumor cell's "skeleton."

The researchers will test the new compound for safety and hope they can develop it to treat cancers such as colon cancer, esophageal cancer, liver and skin cancers.

Iowa City, Ia. - Kara Meiborg told her 2-year-old son, Max, that they were going to a party in his honor.

The Cedar Rapids boy, whose hair is sparse and downy from chemotherapy, paraded in front of more than 1,000 college students, all cheering and clapping as the Meiborg family's name was read on a loudspeaker, along with the names of dozens of other families battling cancer.

"They loved it," Kara Meiborg said of her sons, Max, and Ozzie, 4. "They thought it was great."

A promising drug for fighting cancer is found. It has already been proven relatively safe. Laboratory and animal tests have shown it kills cancer cells and shrinks tumors.

You would think the drug companies would fall all over themselves to do the clinical trials necessary for the drug to be prescribed to cancer patients. Right?

Wrong.

This may be the biggest scandal to hit the medical world in years. Yet so far, all the commercial U.S. media have stayed away from reporting on it.

Scientists in the US claim to have discovered a small group of cells in pancreatic cancer that are capable of fuelling tumour growth.

The research at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre (UMCCC) appears to be the first to successfully identify stem cells in pancreatic tumours.

Cancer stem cells are crucial to a tumour's development and it is hoped that successfully identifying them will lead to more effective treatment.

Pancreatic cancer has one of the worst survival rates among cancer types, making a potential breakthrough in this area all the more significant.

The Greek health ministry has moved to curb what it called "ridiculous behaviour" following reports that a wonder-cure for cancer had been found in olive leaf extract.

"No systematic clinical study exists ... to prove the usefulness of olive leaf or fruit extract (against cancer)," the ministry said in a statement, warning patients against straying from their prescribed medication.

The statement came after several TV chat shows last week hosted self-styled therapists claiming that olive leaves mixed in water had curative properties against the illness.

In July 2005, Jeff Carenza and his girlfriend were enjoying a getaway weekend in Miami when food poisoning landed them both in the hospital. Blood tests showed that Dr. Carenza, then 29, had iron-deficiency anemia.

“It’s probably nothing,” the doctor told him. “But have it checked when you get home.”

This type of anemia can be caused by blood loss from the intestinal tract. So back in St. Louis, where Dr. Carenza was a radiology resident at Barnes Jewish Hospital, his doctor sent him to a gastroenterologist.

ATLANTA - Cancer deaths in the United States have dropped for a second straight year, confirming that a corner has been turned in the war on cancer.

After a decline of 369 deaths from 2002 to 2003, the decrease from 2003 to 2004 was 3,014 — or more than eight times greater, according to a review of U.S. death certificates by the American Cancer Society.

The drop from 2002 to 2003 was the first annual decrease in total cancer deaths since 1930. But the decline was slight, and experts were hesitant to say whether it was a cause for celebration or just a statistical fluke.

President Bush Wednesday hailed the downward trend in cancer deaths in the United States, a signal that medicine is making strides in the battling a disease that kills nearly 1,500 Americans a day.

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) recently made significant strides toward settling a decades-old debate centering on the role played by stem cells in cancer development.

According to the study's findings, which appear in an upcoming issue of Nature Genetics and now available online, genes that are reversibly repressed in embryonic stem cells are over-represented among genes that are permanently silenced in cancers; this link lends support to the increasingly discussed theory that cancer is rooted in small populations of stem cells.

USC researchers uncovered this link after observing that of 177 genes repressed by Polycomb group (PcG) proteins, fully 77 showed evidence of cancer-associated enzymatic modification of DNA (known as methylation). "Finding that a Polycomb target in an embryonic stem cell is 12 times more likely to become abnormally methylated in cancer is highly significant," says Peter Laird, Ph.D., one of the lead researchers and associate professor of surgery, biochemistry and molecular biology, and director of basic research for surgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered that a tiny piece of genetic code apparently goes where no bit of it has gone before, and it gets there under its own internal code.

A report on the renegade ribonucleic acid, and the code that directs its movement, will be published Jan. 5 in Science.

MicroRNAs, already implicated in cancer and normal development, latch on to and gum up larger strands of RNA that carry instructions for making the proteins that do all the cell’s work. They are, says Joshua Mendell, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Hopkins, like "molecular rheostats that fine-tune how much protein is being made from each gene."

By joining a sugar to a short-chain fatty acid compound, Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a two-pronged molecular weapon that kills cancer cells in lab tests. The researchers cautioned that their double-punch molecule, described in the December issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, has not yet been tested on animals or humans. Nevertheless, they believe it represents a promising new strategy for fighting the deadly disease.

"For a long time, cancer researchers did not pay much attention to the use of sugars in fighting cancer," said Gopalan Sampathkumar, a postdoctoral fellow in the university's Department of Biomedical Engineering and lead author of the journal article. "But we found that when the right sugar is matched with the right chemical partner, it can deliver a powerful double-whammy against cancer cells."

WASHINGTON - The hours spent sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms, in line for the CT scan, watching chemotherapy drip into veins: Battling cancer steals a lot of time — at least $2.3 billion worth in the first year of treatment alone.

So says the first study to try to put a price tag to the time that people spend being treated for 11 of the most common cancers.

Even more sobering than the economic toll are the tallies, by government researchers, of the sheer hours lost to cancer care: 368 hours in that first year after diagnosis with ovarian cancer; 272 hours being treated for lung cancer, 193 hours for kidney cancer.