NCI Press Release July 17, 2018 The largest coordinated research effort to study biological and non-biological factors associated with aggressive prostate cancer in African-American men has begun. The $26.5 million study is called RESPOND, or Research on Prostate Cancer in Men of African Ancestry: Defining the Roles of Genetics, Tumor Markers, and Social Stress. It will investigate environmental and genetic factors related to aggressiveness of prostate cancer in African-American men to better understand why they disproportionally experience aggressive disease—that is, disease that grows and spreads quickly—compared with men of other racial and ethnic groups. RESPOND is supported by the National…
Author: Global Cancer Consortium
NFCR Press Release NFCR Writer David Perry July 21, 2018 In both mouse and culture-dish experiments, researchers at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center found that a new line of drugs called CDK inhibitors may herald a new age in treatment for Ewing sarcoma, a cancer in children and adolescents affecting the bones and soft tissue surrounding the bones. “No one has previously considered CDK12 inhibition as a way to combat Ewing sarcoma,” says Kimberly Stegmaier, M.D., senior author of the new Cancer Cell paper describing the findings. She refers to one of a series of proteins known…
NCI Press Release July 10, 2018 Veterans with cancer who receive treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will now have easier access to clinical trials of novel cancer treatments, thanks to an agreement between VA and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. The NCI and VA Interagency Group to Accelerate Trials Enrollment, or NAVIGATE, which is launching at 12 VA facilities across the country, will enhance the ability of veterans to participate in trials carried out through NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) and the NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP). As…
David Perry NFCR Writer June 25, 2018 It is established medical fact that either heating or freezing a cancer cell can kill it, but a new treatment out of the State University of New York at Binghamton (AKA Binghamton University) for pancreatic cancer involves using both, with the result being more of a whole tumor being destroyed. Robert Van Buskirk and John Baust, professors of biological sciences and directors at the school’s Institute of Biomedical Technology, and Kenneth Baumann, a graduate student studying biology, conducted the research. The new process, called dual thermal ablation, could be used when current technologies…
NCI Press Release June 4, 2018 A novel approach to immunotherapy developed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has led to the complete regression of breast cancer in a patient who was unresponsive to all other treatments. This patient received the treatment in a clinical trial led by Steven A. Rosenberg, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Surgery Branch at NCI’s Center for Cancer Research (CCR), and the findings were published June 4, 2018 in Nature Medicine. NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health. “We’ve developed a high-throughput method to identify mutations present in a cancer that…
NCI Press Release June 4, 2018 The National Cancer Institute’s Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH) trial, the largest precision medicine trial of its kind, has achieved a milestone with the release of results from several treatment arms, or sub-studies, of the trial. The new results offer findings of interest for future cancer research that could ultimately play a role in bringing targeted treatments to patients with certain gene abnormalities, regardless of their cancer type. Findings from three arms were released at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago, adding to findings from one arm…
The term nanomedicine, alluding to technologies with mechanisms and surface area characteristics sized in terms of billionths of a meter, has held promise for years, but breakthroughs specific to therapies have been limited. After five years of intense collaborative work by distinguished scientists from Arizona State University (ASU) and China’s National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST), a potential major one has ensued. Their new technology may prove to be among the first capable of successfully distinguishing and delivering precise drugs to cancer-cells. This dual action development could represent a major milestone for oncology nanomedicine. “These nanorobots can be programmed…
ROCKVILLE, MD – Researchers from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital (TMUCIH) have discovered that gastric cancer tissue samples bearing mutation of a specific gene, MUC16, too are associated with higher tumor mutation loads. Also known as tumor mutation burdens, measurement of high genetic mutation rates among cancerous versus healthy tissue has increasingly been shown to correlate with effective response rates to immunotherapy. The knowledge could bode positively for patients with the biomarker present. The findings were published in the newest online edition of JAMA Oncology, based on an analysis of 437 gastric…