News by Subject Medicine & Health

By nudging doctors to OK a screening for breast or colorectal cancer, order rates jumped significantly, but patient completion rates didn't change.

UNC Lineberger researchers discovered a biological signature that could help identify which triple negative breast cancers might respond to immunotherapy and other treatments.

In a breakthrough with important implications for the future of immunotherapy for breast cancer, UC San Francisco scientists have found that blocking the activity of a single enzyme can prevent a common type of breast cancer from spreading to distant organs.

Patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, whose disease has progressed after being treated initially with pertuzumab in combination with trastuzumab and a taxane, can respond well to treatment with T-DM1 -- a drug that combines trastuzumab with an anti-cancer drug called DM1. The research is presented at the Advanced Breast Cancer Fifth International Consensus Conference (ABC5) and published simultaneously in published in Clinical Breast Cancer journal.

During spaceflight, astronauts experience similar physical stress as cancer patients undergoing treatments such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and targeted therapy. In a commentary published Nov. 14 in the journal Cell, researchers suggest that by mimicking a NASA astronaut's schedule of exercising before, during, and after a mission, cancer patients could reduce the long-term impact their treatments often have on their bodies.

A University of Houston College of Pharmacy associate professor has discovered a new biomarker in cancer stem cells that govern cancer survival and spread, and it's raising hope that drug discovery to kill cancer stem cells could follow suit.

Patients with advanced breast cancer that has spread to the skin are likely to cause more harm than good if they use complementary therapies to treat their skin lesions. Professor Maria João Cardoso told the Advanced Breast Cancer Fifth International Consensus Conference (ABC5) in Lisbon that there was a long list of herbal products and creams that patients often try, but many of them could delay wound healing and interfere with systemic anti-cancer treatments such as hormone therapy or chemotherapy.

Doctors who give advanced breast cancer patients just one estimate, such as 12 months, for the average amount of time they are expected to live are only accurate 20-30% of the time, according to Dr. Belinda Kiely, medical oncologist and senior research fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia.

A pacemaker-like device restored heart function in a group of cancer survivors -- mostly women with breast cancer -- who had suffered from heart failure as a result of chemotherapy treatment, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports.

Using CRISPR/Cas9 knockout screens, a multi-institutional research team systematically interrogated the essentiality of more than 10,000 forkhead box protein A1 (FOXA1) and CTCF binding sites in breast and prostate cancer cells, finding that essential FOXA1 binding sites act as enhancers to orchestrate the expression of nearby essential genes.