News by Subject Medicine & Health

Study shows that doctors with personal experience of cancer are more likely to act against established guidelines to recommend that low-risk women receive ovarian cancer screening.

A few little cells that are different from the rest can have a big effect. For example, individual cancer cells may be resistant to a specific chemotherapy -- causing a relapse in a patient who would otherwise be cured. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, scientists have now introduced a microfluidics-based chip for the manipulation and subsequent nucleic-acid analysis of individual cells. The technique uses local electric fields to highly efficiently 'trap' the cells (dielectrophoresis).

The new treatment will serve as both diagnosis and treatment of malignant tumors. This breakthrough in the technologies of cancer diagnosis and treatment was made by an interdisciplinary Russian-German collaboration of chemists, physicists, and biologists from NUST MISIS, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University (RNRMU), and the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany).

When enrolled in a cancer clinical trial, the differences in survival rates between rural and urban patients are significantly reduced, SWOG study results show.

A team of investigators led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) medical oncologist Rupal Bhatt, M.D., Ph.D., has demonstrated that a molecule called KIM-1, a protein present in the blood of some patients with renal cell carcinoma is present at elevated levels at the time of diagnosis, can also serve as a tool to predict the disease's onset up to five years prior to diagnosis.

A new study focusing on the environment inside cancer cells may lead to new targeted treatment strategies. Moffitt Cancer Center researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Maryland and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine Barcelona, suggest that lowering the pH inside cancer cells to make it more acidic can slow down the growth and spread of the disease, and possibly provide new options for treatment. Their results were published in Nature Communications.

University of Colorado Cancer Center clinical trial results describe a promising strategy to remove one of melanoma's most powerful defenses: By adding retinoic acid to standard-of-care treatment, researchers were able to turn off myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) that turn off the immune system, leading to more immune system activity directed at melanoma.

In a spectacular new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have discovered a method of diagnosing a broad range of cancers at their early stages by utilizing a particular malaria protein, which sticks to cancer cells in blood samples. The researchers hope that this method can be used in cancer screenings in the near future.