
Membrane around tumors may be key to preventing metastasis
Research News Release
EurekAlert! provides eligible reporters with free access to embargoed and breaking news releases.
Eligibility GuidelinesEurekAlert! offers eligible public information officers paid access to a reliable news release distribution service.
Eligibility GuidelinesEurekAlert! is a service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
MIT engineers have characterized the properties of the protective membrane around tumors and found that this lining may be a good target for therapies to prevent metastasis.
Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Biosensors and Bioelectronics a successful test of a sensor for measuring hydrogen peroxide concentrations near cell membranes. The sensor has the potential to become a tool for new cancer therapies.
Scientists at Urology Research Laboratory of the Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR), University of Bern and Urology Department of the Inselspital of Bern, have established organoid culture models from prostate tumor biopsies. These are small clusters of cells which can be used to test the efficacy of various drugs. In this way, it is possible to test which treatment will most likely benefit individual patients.
A new substance could improve the treatment of persistent cancers. Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the University of Greifswald have developed a new inhibitor that makes drug-resistant tumour cells respond again to chemotherapy. The new substance blocks a protein in the cancer cells that normally transports the cancer drugs back out of the cells. The results were published in the scientific journal "Molecules".
The precise choice of treatment for breast cancer depends upon the status of the hormone receptors (for oestrogen and progesterone). Now it is possible to use decision theory to optimally combine diagnostic findings.
A recently published study offers new clues as to why night shift workers are at increased risk of developing certain types of cancer compared to those who work regular daytime hours. Findings suggest that night shifts disrupt natural 24-hour rhythms in the activity of certain cancer-related genes, making night shift workers more vulnerable to DNA damage while also causing the body's DNA repair mechanisms to be mistimed to deal with that damage.
Physicians understand frailty as a dysregulation among multiple systems in the body that make it less resilient and unable to recover completely when faced with a physical challenge such as injury or illness. "Defining frailty on a scientific level, however, has been a challenging task," explains Ravi Varadhan, Ph.D., associate professor of oncology in the Division of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.
Immune cells accessing cerebrospinal fluid faithfully recapitulate the characteristics of cells identified in brain metastasis, and could therefore constitute novel biomarkers of response to immune-based therapies.
For the drug approval process in the United States, investigators have been expanding clinical trials to sites outside the country. However, a new study indicates that this trend may be widening racial disparities in patient enrollment in cancer clinical trials. The study is published by Wiley early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
"In conclusion, estrogen receptor α PvuII polymorphism is associated with dementia in a Brazilian cohort"