Athens, Ga. — New University of Georgia research has identified a protein that can be modified to improve the effectiveness of one of the most common drugs used to treat pancreatic cancer.
The research, published in the March edition of the jour…
TORONTO, Ont., Feb. 11, 2011 — The daughters of rats who took folic acid supplements before conception, during pregnancy and while breast-feeding have breast cancer rates twice as high as other rats, according to a new study.
They also had more t…
DURHAM, NC — Cancer prevention experts have long been frustrated by the lack of a meaningful way to screen women for ovarian cancer. It is a relatively rare disease that often progresses with few symptoms until it is too late for potentially curat…
Eating five portions of fruit and vegetables per day is one of the means that experts most frequently recommend for preventing cancer. Now, the European EPIC study carried out by researchers from 10 countries has shown that, in the case of lung …
Although the benefits of green tea are widely touted, a study conducted by Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and North Central Cancer Treatment Group shows green tea is not an effective treatment for advanced prostate cancer. “Previous laboratory studies suggested that green tea might be an effective anticancer treatment,” says Aminah Jatoi, M.D., a Mayo Clinic medical oncologist and lead researcher on the study. “However, in our study of 42 patients with advanced androgen-independent prostate cancer, only one patient showed a short-term drop in his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels.
New research suggests that combining the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel with very low doses of the HIV-fighting drug AZT may shrink or even eradicate certain types of cancer tumors. Using both drugs in mice helped inhibit the enzyme telomerase, a component critical to the livelihood of some cancer cells. Telomerase helps to build and maintain telomeres ? protective strands of DNA at each end of a chromosome.
Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy often endure painful side effects caused by the powerful drugs as they course through their entire bodies, damaging healthy tissue and tumors alike. Utah researchers are reporting in the December issue “Cancer Research” that they have successfully tested a new method in laboratory animals that would concentrate the impact of cancer drugs on specific cancerous tissues, thus sparing the rest of the body from harm.
Amid the glowing results for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients using Gleevec the past three years, the one reality check has been that a majority of the patients with advanced disease eventually relapse and die of the leukemia. An article to be published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research shows that, in the lab, the molecular mutations that produce a resistance to Gleevec can be overcome. Brian Druker, M.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research at the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute, and colleagues report that a compound called PD180970 successfully stopped the activity of several mutations found in patients who developed a resistance to Gleevec.
Researchers have generated a mouse model of a new type of tumor suppressor gene that triggers a rapidly advancing cancer that affects children. The discovery of the fast-onset cancers that result from inactivation of the gene and the technique used to generate the model will likely prove useful in studying genes involved in other forms of cancer.