Researchers from McGill University’s Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre (GCRC), the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC), the Dana — Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School have discovered a…
Xenotropic murine leukemia virus — related virus (XMRV) has been the subject of many studies since its discovery in 2006, but conflicting reports have created an unclear picture of XMRV’s role in human disease. In three recent studies published in …
Racial disparities in the receipt of breast cancer care persist despite accounting for patients’ insurance and social and economic status. That is the conclusion of a study published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Ca…
A drug being developed as a treatment for ovarian cancer has shown single agent activity with durable disease control in some patients in a Phase-II clinical trial, an international research group has reported.
Dr Ursula Matulonis from Dana-Farber…
BOSTON–Patients with colon cancer who used multivitamins during and after being treated with post-surgical chemotherapy did not reduce the risk of the cancer returning or their dying from it, according to researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Ins…
Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a team of international collaborators have identified a genetic abnormality that makes ovarian tumor cells initially sensitive to a common chemotherapy agent, cisplatin, and then resistant to the drug over time.
In a discovery sparked by a routine check-up of a young cancer survivor, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston have identified a gene responsible for a childhood form of the kidney tumor papillary renal cell carcinoma (PRCC).
Radiofrequency ablation can ease pain, slow tumor growth, and even destroy tumors in patients with advanced lung cancer, a new study shows. ?We treated 12 patients with thoracic tumors using radiofreqency ablation, which is the use of extreme heat to treat tumors,? says Eric vanSonnenberg, MD, chief of radiology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and visiting professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and lead author of the study. The patients either had maximal applications of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy or were unfit for these therapies anymore, Dr. vanSonnenberg says.
Researchers report that in some cases of stem cell transplants from female donors to male recipients, the transplanted cells mount an immunological attack against the product of a gene carried by most cells in the body of male recipients. Emmanuel Zorn, PhD, says it is the first time that the gene, located on the Y chromosome and known as DBY, has been identified following a female-to-male stem cell transplant for leukemia.
Building on earlier studies that have shown that common painkillers known as NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) can reduce the risk of colon cancer in healthy people, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a mechanism by which NSAIDs inhibit the development of colon cancer. Compared with normal cells, colorectal cancer cells have abnormally high levels of an immune system protein, IL-6. David Frank, MD, PhD, and his Dana-Farber colleagues have discovered that IL-6 triggers malignant growth by activating a protein called STAT1, which transmits signals that prevent the normal scheduled death of cells in the colon.
Scientists have used a powerful gene-mapping technique to produce the clearest picture yet of all the genes of an animal ? the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans (better known as C. elegans). Scientists believe the same technique may be used to bring the current, somewhat blurry picture of the human genome into sharper focus. The study, in Nature Genetics, describes an effort to locate and precisely identify all of the approximately 19,000 genes that have been predicted to exist in the genome of C. elegans.
The benefit of some cancer vaccines may be boosted by treating patients with an antibody that blocks a key protein on immune system T cells, according to a small, preliminary study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The study tested the effect of a single injection of the antibody MDX-CTLA4 in nine patients who had previously been treated with cancer vaccines for either metastatic melanoma or metastatic ovarian cancer. The result, in every patient who had received a particular kind of vaccine, was widespread death of cancer cells and an increase in the number of immune system cells within the tumors ? evidence of a potent immune system attack.