Scientists Spot Genetic Traces of Individual Cancers

Scientists Spot Genetic Traces of Individual Cancers.
Researchers have found a modus operandi to analyze the speck of a cancer, and then use that trace to track the trajectory of that particular tumor in that particular person. "This facility will allow us to measure the amount of cancer in any clinical specimen as soon as the cancer is identified by biopsy," said reflect on co-author Dr Luis Diaz, an assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University.

And "This can then be scanned for gene rearrangements, which will then be second-hand as a template to track that exacting cancer." Diaz is one of a group of researchers from the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center that sign in on the idea in the Feb 24 issue of Science Translational Medicine. This latest finding brings scientists one motion closer to personalized cancer treatments, experts say.

But "These researchers have determinate the entire genomic sequence of several breast and colon cancers with great precision," said Katrina L Kelner, the journal's editor. "They have been able to connect small genomic rearrangements single to that tumor and, by following them over time, have been able to follow the course of the disease." One of the biggest challenges in cancer care is being able to see what the cancer is doing after surgery, chemo or radiation and, in so doing, help guide therapy decisions. "Some cancers can be monitored by CT scans or other imaging modalities, and a few have biomarkers you can follow in the blood but, to date, no infinite method of accurate surveillance exists," Diaz stated.

Almost all anthropoid cancers, however, exhibit "rearrangement" of their chromosomes. "Rearrangements are the most dramatic form of genetic changes that can occur," lucubrate co-author Dr Victor Velculescu explained, likening these arrangements to the chapters of a enlist being out of order. This type of mistake is much easier to recognize than a mere typo on one page.

New Methods In The Study Of Breast Cancer

New Methods In The Study Of Breast Cancer.
An theoretical blood assess could help show whether women with advanced breast cancer are responding to treatment, a beginning study suggests. The test detects abnormal DNA from tumor cells circulating in the blood. And the novel findings, reported in the March 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, signal that it could outperform existing blood tests at gauging some women's feedback to treatment for metastatic breast cancer. That's an advanced form of breast cancer, where tumors have jelly to other parts of the body - most often the bones, lungs, liver or brain.

There is no cure, but chemotherapy, hormonal psychoanalysis or other treatments can slow disease progression and ease symptoms. The sooner doctors can advise whether the treatment is working, the better. That helps women avoid the plane effects of an ineffective therapy, and may enable them to switch to a better one.

Right now, doctors monitor metastatic chest cancer with the help of imaging tests, such as CT scans. They may also use certain blood tests - including one that detects tumor cells floating in the bloodstream, and one that measures a tumor "marker" called CA 15-3.

But imaging does not charge the sound story, and it can expose women to significant doses of radiation. The blood tests also have limitations and are not routinely used. "Practically speaking, there's a leviathan miss for novel methods" of monitoring women, said Dr Yuan Yuan, an aid professor of medical oncology at City of Hope cancer center in Duarte, Calif.

For the changed study, researchers at the University of Cambridge in England took blood samples from 30 women being treated for metastatic knocker cancer and having standard imaging tests. They found that the tumor DNA exam performed better than either the CA 15-3 or the tumor cell check when it came to estimating the women's treatment response. Of 20 women the researchers were able to follow for more than 100 days, 19 showed cancer course on their CT scans.

And 17 of them had shown rising tumor DNA levels. In contrast, only seven had a rising million of tumor cells, while nine had an increase in CA 15-3 levels. For 10 of those 19 women, tumor DNA was on the occur an typical of five months before CT scans showed their cancer was progressing. "The take-home message is that circulating tumor DNA is a better monitoring biomarker than the existing Food and Drug Administration-approved ones," said elder researcher Dr Carlos Caldas.

Promising Method For Early Diagnosis Of Cancer

Promising Method For Early Diagnosis Of Cancer.
A collaboration of US scientists and non-public companies are looking into a assay that could find even one stray cancer stall among the billions of cells that circulate in the human bloodstream. The hope is that one day such a test, given soon after a healing is started, could indicate whether the therapy is working or not. It might even indicate beforehand which remedying would be most effective. The test relies on circulating tumor cells (CTCs) - cancer cells that have disjoined from the main tumor and are traveling to other parts of the body.

In 2007, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, developed a "microfluidic chip," called CellSearch, which could calculate the number of singular cancer cells, but that test didn't allow scientists to trap whole cells and analyze them. But on Monday, Mass General announced an bargain with Veridex LLC, involvement of Johnson & Johnson, to study a newer version of the test.

According to the Associated Press, the updated prove requires only a couple of teaspoons of blood. The microchip is dotted with tens of thousands of paltry posts covered with antibodies designed to stick to tumor cells. As blood passes over the chip, tumor cells divided from the pack and adhere to the posts.

Features Of Surgery For Cancer

Features Of Surgery For Cancer.
After chemotherapy, surgery and dispersal to present the original tumor might not benefit women with advanced breast cancer, a new muse about shows in Dec 2013. A minority of women with breast cancer discover they have the virus in its later stages, after it has spread to other parts of the body. These patients typically are started on chemotherapy to serve shrink the cancerous growths and slow the disease's progress. Beyond that, doctors have yearn wondered whether it's also a good idea to treat the original breast tumor with surgery or emanation even though the cancer has taken root in other organs.

And "Our trial did show there's no benefit of doing surgery," said lessons author Dr Rajendra Badwe, head of the surgical breast component at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India. It didn't seem to matter if patients were progeny or old, if their cancer was hormone receptor positive or negative, or if they had a few sites of spreading cancer or a lot. Surgery didn't lengthen their lives. The study was scheduled for presentation this week at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, in Texas.

The results aren't shocking, since experiments in animals performed more than 30 years ago suggested that freezing out the elementary tumor only egged on cancer at the supportive sites. But studies in humans have suggested that removing the original cancer in the heart of hearts may increase survival. Those studies aren't thought to be definitive, however, because they looked back only at what happened after women already underwent treatment. One virtuoso not involved in the new study also questioned the electing of patients in the previous research.

So "There's a lot of bias with that because you tend to operate on patients you think might do well to begin with," said Dr Stephanie Bernik, superintendent of surgical oncology at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "We absolutely need more evidence to guide us". To congregate that evidence, researchers randomly assigned 350 women who responded to their initial chemotherapy to one of two courses of treatment. The head group had surgery followed by radiation to remove the primitive breast tumor and lymph nodes under the arms.

Not Found Therapeutic Properties Of Shark Cartilage In The Treatment Of Lung Cancer

Not Found Therapeutic Properties Of Shark Cartilage In The Treatment Of Lung Cancer.
A antidepressant derived from shark cartilage failed to better survival in patients with advanced lung cancer, researchers report. The discouraging results, which came in the conclusive stage of testing, showed that the drug didn't help extend the life spans of patients with inoperable situation 3 non-small cell lung cancer. Scientists have been testing drugs derived from shark cartilage because it appears to balk blood vessels from growing around tumors. The foresee is that the drugs will prevent cancer cells from being fed by blood, which allows them to grow.

Researchers led by Dr Charles Lu, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, tested the delineated narcotize in question, known as AE-941, on patients in the United States and Canada. In the study, published online May 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a come to of 379 patients with inoperable non-small room lung cancer were treated with chemoradiotherapy and either AE-941 or an listless placebo.

There was no significant difference in outcome between the two groups in terms of overall survival, or in term of time before the disease progressed, the researchers found. The study authors noted that the study's motivation was "the widespread use of poorly regulated complementary and alternative medicine products, such as shark cartilage-derived agents, in the midst patients with advanced cancer, a population likely to be vulnerable to unsubstantiated marketing claims".

Lung cancer also called as bronchogenic carcinoma. Lung cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in the world. It is a influential cause of cancer death in men and women in the United States. Cigarette smoking causes most lung cancers. The more cigarettes you smoke per prime and the earlier you started smoking, the greater your gamble of lung cancer. High levels of pollution, dispersal and asbestos exposure may also increase risk.

New Promise Against Certain Types Of Lung Cancer

New Promise Against Certain Types Of Lung Cancer.
An theoretical cancer anaesthetize is proving effective in treating the lung cancers of some patients whose tumors convey a certain genetic mutation, new studies show. Because the mutation can be hand over in other forms of cancer - including a rare form of sarcoma (cancer of the soft tissue), babyhood neuroblastoma (brain tumor), as well as some lymphomas, breast and colon cancers - researchers break they are hopeful the drug, crizotinib, will prove effective in treating those cancers as well. In one study, researchers identified 82 patients from among 1500 patients with non-small-cell lung cancer, the most general type of lung malignancy, whose tumors had a mutation in the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene.

Crizotinib targets the ALK "driver kinase," or protein, blocking its pursuit and preventing the tumor from growing, explained contemplate co-author Dr Geoffrey Shapiro, director of the Early Drug Development Center and fellow-worker professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston. "The cancer apartment is actually addicted to the activity of the protein for its evolution and survival. It's totally dependent on it. The idea is that blocking that protein can fag the cancer cell".

In 46 patients taking crizotinib, the tumor shrunk by more than 30 percent during an normal of six months of taking the drug. In 27 patients, crizotinib halted rise of the tumor, while in one patient the tumor disappeared.

The drug also had few side effects. The most common was merciful gastrointestinal symptoms. "These are very positive results in lung cancer patients who had received other treatments that didn't livelihood or worked only briefly. The bottom line is that there was a 72 percent chance the tumor would shrivel or remain stable for at least six months".

The study is published in the Oct 28, 2010 proclamation of the New England Journal of Medicine. In recent years, researchers have started to ruminate of lung cancer less as a single disease and more as a group of diseases that rely on established genetic mutations called "driver kinases," or proteins that enable the tumor cells to proliferate.

That has led some researchers to zero in on developing drugs that target those specific abnormalities. "Being able to govern those kinases and disrupt their signaling is evolving into a very successful approach".

Smokers' Lung Malignant Tumor Can Contain Up To 50000 Genetic Mutations

Smokers' Lung Malignant Tumor Can Contain Up To 50000 Genetic Mutations.
Malignant lung tumors may control not one, not two, but potentially tens of thousands of genetic mutations which, together, give to the maturity of the cancer. A experience from a lung tumor from a heavy smoker revealed 50000 mutations, according to a report in the May 27 offspring of Nature. "People in the field have always known that we're going to end up having to deal with multiple mutations," said Dr Hossein Borghaei, cicerone of the Lung and Head and Neck Cancer Risk Assessment Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. "This tells us that we're not just dealing with one stall business that's gone crazy.

We're dealing with multiple mutations. Every thinkable pathway that could possibly go wrong is probably found among all these mutations and changes". The revelation does attitude "additional difficulties" for researchers looking for targets for better treatments or even a cure for lung and other types of cancer, said workroom senior author Zemin Zhang, a senior scientist with Genentech Inc in South San Francisco.

Frustrating though the findings may seem, the expertise gleaned from this and other studies "gives investigators a starting meat to go back and look and see if there is a common pathway, a common protein that a couple of discrete drugs could attack and perhaps slow the progression". The researchers examined cells from lung cancer samples (non-small-cell lung cancer) alliance to a 51-year-old man who had smoked 25 cigarettes a hour for 15 years.

Scientists Have Found A New Method Of Cancer Treatment

Scientists Have Found A New Method Of Cancer Treatment.
Blocking a main protein complicated in the growth of a rare, incurable type of soft-tissue cancer may ice the disease, according to a new study involving mice. Researchers from UT Southwestern found that inhibiting the power of a protein, known as BRD4, caused cancer cells in malignant peripheral impudence sheath tumors to die. Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors are highly assertive soft-tissue cancers, or sarcomas, that form around nerves.

And "This study identifies a potential unfledged therapeutic target to combat malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor, an incurable genre of cancer that is typically fatal," study senior author Dr Lu Le, an deputy professor of dermatology, said in a university news release. "The findings also provide leading insight into what causes these tumors to develop". The findings were published online Dec 26, 2013 in the daily Cell Reports.

Although malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors can amplify randomly, about 50 percent of cases involve patients with a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis category 1. This disorder affects one in 3500 people. About 10 percent of those patients will go on to reveal the soft-tissue cancer, according to the news release. For the study, the researchers examined changes in cells as they evolved into cancerous soft-tissue tumors.