General

A PhD candidate from Canada’s Queen’s University Caitlin Miron had recently accepted the Mitacs Award for Outstanding Innovation as a token of recognition for a ground-breaking discovery in cancer research. Sifting through numerous chemical compounds, Miron had identified a novel substance which binds to a four-strand DNA structure called a […]

The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer‘s disease – most likely you already know that. However, other causes are not somehow less significant just because of smaller number of cases. Dementia with Lewy Bodies is the third most common form of dementia, but it still affects millions of people. […]

Glaucoma, which affects over 60 million people worldwide, can seem easy to treat: medicated eye drops can be used to ease the buildup of fluid in the eye that underlies the condition. If glaucoma is caught early, eye drops can prevent irreversible blindness. But prescription eye drops aren’t the perfect […]

Researchers at the Whitehead Institute have illuminated an important role for different subtypes of muscle cells in orchestrating the process of tissue regeneration. In a paper appearing in Nature, they reveal that a subtype of muscle fibers in flatworms is required for triggering the activity of genes that initiate the regeneration program. […]

Researchers at King's College London have discovered new mechanisms of cell death, which may be involved in debilitating neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. This novel research, published in Current Biology, could lead to new therapeutic approaches for treating or delaying the progression of neurodegenerative conditions that are […]

How can we facilitate better knowledge transfer and collaboration between multi-disciplinary healthcare teams to improve the continuity of care for patients in an environment where new treatment approaches are fundamentally shifting how patients live with their cancer? Why the Rewrite Cancer Innovation Challenge? Significant strides have been made to improve […]

A team of bioengineers and bioinformaticians at the University of California San Diego have discovered how the environment surrounding a tumor can trigger metastatic behavior in cancer cells. Specifically, when tumor cells are confined in a dense environment, the researchers found that they turn on a specific set of genes […]

New research shows that chronic stress suppresses the immune system’s response to cancer, reducing the effectiveness of immunotherapy treatments. University of Queensland scientists say they are investigating dual therapies for patients to reduce stress signalling and improve their response to treatments. UQ Diamantina Institute researcher Dr Stephen Mattarollo said lymphoma progressed more rapidly in […]

A signaling pathway in cells that regulates fat production could become a new target for cancer drugs, according to a finding by Weill Cornell Medicine researchers. The discovery of the signaling pathway, reported in Cell, represents a significant advance in understanding how cells regulate their growth in health and disease. […]

After years of rigorous research, a team of scientists has identified the genetic engine that drives a rare form of liver cancer. The findings offer prime targets for drugs to treat the usually lethal disease, fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma (FL-HCC), which mainly strikes adolescents and young adults. Sanford Simon, who conducted […]

So-called “triple-negative” breast cancer is a particularly aggressive and difficult-to-treat form. It accounts for only about 10 percent of breast cancer cases, but is responsible for about 25 percent of breast cancer fatalities. Triple-negative breast cancer earns its name because, unlike other breast cancer subtypes, its cells test negative for […]

Cancer immunotherapy drugs have had notable but limited success because in many cases, tumors develop resistance to treatment. But researchers at Yale and Stanford have identified an experimental antibody that overcomes this problem by targeting a wider range of immune cells linked to tumor growth. Existing cancer immunotherapies act on only a […]

Using CRISPR genome editing, the team took the genetic engineering of killer T-cells one step further by removing their non-cancer specific receptors and replacing them with ones that would recognise specific cancer cells and destroy them. Dr Mateusz Legut from Cardiff University, who led the study while undertaking a Cancer […]

Catching cancer early can make all the difference for successful treatment. A common screening practice measures tumor growth with X-ray computed tomography (CT), which takes a series of cross-section images of the body. Before they are used in clinics, researchers test multiple CT imaging techniques with standard objects called “phantoms,” […]

Doctors have many drugs available to treat multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. However, there is no way to predict, by genetic markers or other means, how a patient will respond to a particular drug. This can lead to months of treatment with a drug that isn’t working. Researchers […]

“The biological clock ensures that a plant times its metabolism according to the environment,” says Dorothee Staiger. “Thus enabling it to directly use the first rays of sunlight for photosynthesis to produce carbohydrates, for example.” As the Nobel Prize winners have shown, individual genes in the genome of plants, animals […]

Since it first evolved in the common ancestor to multicellular animals some one billion years ago, the p53 family of genes has played the role of genomic guardian for countless organisms. So essential is its task—to protect the DNA of cells from damage and stress—that some form of p53 can […]

Folding your laundry or doing the dishes might not be the most enjoyable parts of your day. But simple activities like these may help prolong your life, according to the findings of a new study in older women led by the University at Buffalo. In the U.S. study of more […]

Nevan Krogan, PhD, is a mapmaker, but the object of his exploration is not any newfound continent or alien world. Instead, he and his colleagues map cells. Rather than cities, towns and interstates, these maps show proteins, genes, and the shifting, convoluted network of interactions between them. Learning to read […]

Scientists have created mini biological models of human primary liver cancers, known as organoids, in the lab for the first time. In a paper published in Nature Medicine, the tiny laboratory models of tumours were used to identify a new drug that could potentially treat certain types of liver cancer. Primary liver cancer […]

Cornell researchers have taken a major step toward answering a key question in cancer research: Why is testicular cancer so responsive to chemotherapy, even after it metastasizes? Professional cyclist Lance Armstrong, for example, had testicular cancer that spread to his lung and brain, yet he made a full recovery after […]

Harvard Medical School researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital have reversed type 1 diabetes in mice by infusing blood stem cells pretreated to produce more of a protein called PD-L1, which is deficient in mice and people with type 1 diabetes. The stem cells curbed the autoimmune reaction in cells from […]

The team of researchers, working with biopharmaceutical company Autolus Ltd, have discovered a method of targeting the cancer without destroying healthy T-cells, essential to the immune system. Lymphomas arise when immune cells, called lymphocytes, that protect us against germs, become cancerous. There are two types of lymphocytes: B-cells and T-cells. […]

Primary liver cancer is now the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, and its incidences and mortality are increasing rapidly in the United Stated. In late stages of the malignancy, there are no effective treatments or drugs. However, an unexpected finding made by a team of University of California […]

Paving the way for testing experimental drugs in more realistic environments, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have discovered how to make tiny colonies of cells grow in useful new ways inside petri dishes. The research team’s discoveries might help designers of miniature “lab-on-a-chip” technologies to […]

New research shows that the number of people with Parkinson’s disease will soon grow to pandemic proportions.  In a commentary appearing today in the journal JAMA Neurology, University of Rochester Medical Center neurologist Ray Dorsey, M.D. and Bastiaan Bloem, M.D., Ph.D., with Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, argue that the medical […]

A recent multi-centre study, led by King’s College London and the University of Manchester, has established that synapse loss in Alzheimer’s disease is driven by a specific signalling pathway. This pathway is called the Wnt-planar cell polarity (PCP) signalling pathway and it may be pivotal to the progressive neurodegeneration seen […]

Certain prostate cancers and lymphomas have a major genetic weakness that doctors can exploit to help save patients’ lives, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have discovered. The weakness makes the subset of cancers particularly vulnerable to chemotherapy and radiation therapy, suggesting that those approaches should be […]

The busy world inside a cell is directed by its DNA blueprint. When the blueprints are altered, cells can sicken, die or become cancerous. To keep DNA in working order, cells have ways to detect and mend damaged DNA. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis […]

Honeycomb-like arrays of tiny, lab-grown cancers could one day help doctors zero in on individualized treatments for ovarian cancer, an unpredictable disease that kills more than 14,000 women each year in the United States alone. A team of researchers has devised a process that can grow hundreds of cultured cell […]