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Shape of nanoparticles points the way toward more targeted drugs
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/11/2013) - A new study involving Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute researchers contributing to work by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the shape of nanoparticles can enhance drug targeting. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that rod-shaped nanoparticles—or nanorods—as opposed to spherical nanoparticles, appear to adhere more effectively to the surface of endothelial cells that line the inside of blood vessels.
Tumors disable immune cells by using up sugar
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/07/2013) - Cancer cells’ appetite for sugar may have serious consequences for immune cell function, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have learned. The scientists found that when they kept sugar away from critical immune cells called T cells, the cells no longer produced interferon gamma, an inflammatory compound important for fighting tumors and some kinds of infection.
Mathematical technique de-clutters cancer-cell data, revealing tumor evolution
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/07/2013) - Using increasingly cheap and rapid methods to read the billions of “letters” that comprise human genomes – including the genomes of individual cells sampled from cancerous tumors -- scientists are generating far more data than they can easily interpret. Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have published a mathematical method of simplifying and interpreting genome data bearing evidence of mutations, such as those that characterize specific cancers. Not only is the technique highly accurate; it has immediate utility in efforts to parse tumor cells, in order to determine a patient’s prognosis and the best approach to treatment.
Potential new way to suppress tumor growth
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/04/2013) - Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (home of the Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center), with colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center, have identified a new mechanism that appears to suppress tumor growth, opening the possibility of developing a new class of anti-cancer drugs. Writing in this week’s online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team reports that a particular form of a signaling protein called STAT5A stabilizes the formation of heterochromatin (a form of chromosomal DNA), which in turn suppresses the ability of cancer cells to issue instructions to multiply and grow.
Targeted drug for uveal melanoma
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/04/2013) - Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center presented findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology from a study testing the experimental drug selumetinib as a treatment for patients with metastatic uveal melanoma. This treatment more than doubled the time to progression when compared with chemotherapy. Many patients receiving selumetinib experienced tumor shrinkage, making selumetinib the first systemic therapy ever to benefit patients with this cancer. The findings are potentially practice changing for a disease that has previously had no known effective therapy.
Oncogene mutation hijacks splicing process to promote growth and survival
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - An international team of researchers – led by researchers from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the Department of Pathology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (home of the Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center) – has found that a singular gene mutation helps brain cancer cells to not just survive, but grow tumors rapidly by altering the splicing of genes that control cellular metabolism. The findings are published online in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Targeted therapy boosts lung cancer outcomes
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - Thousands of patients with an advanced form of lung cancer that carries a specific dysfunctional gene are likely to fare better if treated with a targeted therapy than with traditional chemotherapy, report Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers and a team of international collaborators.
Studies confirm crizotinib's superiority to chemotherapy for ALK-positive lung cancer
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - Research teams led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center (a component of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) investigators are publishing two important studies regarding use of the targeted cancer drug crizotinib for treatment of advanced lung cancer driven by specific genetic mutations. The first reports the final results of a global, phase 3 trial showing that crizotinib is superior to standard chemotherapy for treatment of advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The second paper describes the first report of resistance to crizotinib treatment in a patient with ROS1-positive NSCLC and reveals the mechanism underlying that resistance. Both papers are being published online in the New England Journal of Medicine to coincide with the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting.
Cytomegalovirus might speed brain cancer growth
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - A virus that infects most Americans but that usually remains dormant in the body might speed the progression of an aggressive form of brain cancer when particular genes are shut off in tumor cells, new research shows. The animal study by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) and at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute suggests that cytomegalovirus (CMV) might significantly accelerate the development and progression of glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer.
Combination of drugs produces dramatic tumor responses in advanced melanoma patients
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - The combination of the immunotherapy drug ipilimumab and the investigational antibody drug nivolumab led to long-lasting tumor shrinkage in more than half of patients with metastatic melanoma, according to results from a Phase I trial simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/11/2013) - A new study involving Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute researchers contributing to work by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the shape of nanoparticles can enhance drug targeting. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that rod-shaped nanoparticles—or nanorods—as opposed to spherical nanoparticles, appear to adhere more effectively to the surface of endothelial cells that line the inside of blood vessels.
Tumors disable immune cells by using up sugar
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/07/2013) - Cancer cells’ appetite for sugar may have serious consequences for immune cell function, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have learned. The scientists found that when they kept sugar away from critical immune cells called T cells, the cells no longer produced interferon gamma, an inflammatory compound important for fighting tumors and some kinds of infection.
Mathematical technique de-clutters cancer-cell data, revealing tumor evolution
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/07/2013) - Using increasingly cheap and rapid methods to read the billions of “letters” that comprise human genomes – including the genomes of individual cells sampled from cancerous tumors -- scientists are generating far more data than they can easily interpret. Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have published a mathematical method of simplifying and interpreting genome data bearing evidence of mutations, such as those that characterize specific cancers. Not only is the technique highly accurate; it has immediate utility in efforts to parse tumor cells, in order to determine a patient’s prognosis and the best approach to treatment.
Potential new way to suppress tumor growth
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/04/2013) - Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (home of the Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center), with colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center, have identified a new mechanism that appears to suppress tumor growth, opening the possibility of developing a new class of anti-cancer drugs. Writing in this week’s online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team reports that a particular form of a signaling protein called STAT5A stabilizes the formation of heterochromatin (a form of chromosomal DNA), which in turn suppresses the ability of cancer cells to issue instructions to multiply and grow.
Targeted drug for uveal melanoma
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/04/2013) - Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center presented findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology from a study testing the experimental drug selumetinib as a treatment for patients with metastatic uveal melanoma. This treatment more than doubled the time to progression when compared with chemotherapy. Many patients receiving selumetinib experienced tumor shrinkage, making selumetinib the first systemic therapy ever to benefit patients with this cancer. The findings are potentially practice changing for a disease that has previously had no known effective therapy.
Oncogene mutation hijacks splicing process to promote growth and survival
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - An international team of researchers – led by researchers from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the Department of Pathology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (home of the Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center) – has found that a singular gene mutation helps brain cancer cells to not just survive, but grow tumors rapidly by altering the splicing of genes that control cellular metabolism. The findings are published online in the journal Cell Metabolism.
Targeted therapy boosts lung cancer outcomes
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - Thousands of patients with an advanced form of lung cancer that carries a specific dysfunctional gene are likely to fare better if treated with a targeted therapy than with traditional chemotherapy, report Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers and a team of international collaborators.
Studies confirm crizotinib's superiority to chemotherapy for ALK-positive lung cancer
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - Research teams led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center (a component of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) investigators are publishing two important studies regarding use of the targeted cancer drug crizotinib for treatment of advanced lung cancer driven by specific genetic mutations. The first reports the final results of a global, phase 3 trial showing that crizotinib is superior to standard chemotherapy for treatment of advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The second paper describes the first report of resistance to crizotinib treatment in a patient with ROS1-positive NSCLC and reveals the mechanism underlying that resistance. Both papers are being published online in the New England Journal of Medicine to coincide with the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting.
Cytomegalovirus might speed brain cancer growth
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - A virus that infects most Americans but that usually remains dormant in the body might speed the progression of an aggressive form of brain cancer when particular genes are shut off in tumor cells, new research shows. The animal study by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) and at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute suggests that cytomegalovirus (CMV) might significantly accelerate the development and progression of glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain cancer.
Combination of drugs produces dramatic tumor responses in advanced melanoma patients
NCI Cancer Center News
(Posted: 06/03/2013) - The combination of the immunotherapy drug ipilimumab and the investigational antibody drug nivolumab led to long-lasting tumor shrinkage in more than half of patients with metastatic melanoma, according to results from a Phase I trial simultaneously published in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
