News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers using long-read DNA sequencing have made one of the most detailed maps ever of structural variations in a cancer cell's genome. The map reveals about 20,000 structural variations, few of which have been noted before, in just one cell type associated with one form of breast cancer.

Initial results of a new national clinical trial show that the majority of women with breast cancer who have two to three sites of disease in a single breast at the time of diagnosis are able to successfully complete breast-conserving surgery without conversion to mastectomy. This is the first prospective study to assess this possibility, and its findings improve the surgical choices available to women with multiple ipsilateral breast cancer.

Commercial insurance medical policies that do not cover treatment with proton therapy can make it difficult for patients to participate in randomized clinical trials funded by the NCI, part of the National Institutes of Health, that are evaluating the therapy.

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona developed a new method to systematically identify genes contributing to heritable cancer risk. Their work, which is published in Nature Communications, is a success story for data sharing and openness in science. Just three researchers identified new cancer genes only using publically available data.

Through x-ray crystallography and kinase-inhibitor specificity profiling, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers, in collaboration with researchers at Peking University and Zhejiang University, reveal that curcumin, a natural occurring chemical compound found in the spice turmeric, binds to the kinase enzyme dual-specificity tyrosine-regulated kinase 2 (DYRK2) at the atomic level. This previously unreported biochemical interaction of curcumin leads to inhibition of DYRK2 that impairs cell proliferation and reduces cancer burden.

New research uncovers how a sticky protein called fibronectin promotes the activity of estrogen in breast cancer cells. The study, 'Fibronectin rescues estrogen receptor α from lysosomal degradation in breast cancer cells,' will be published July 6 in the Journal of Cell Biology (JCB).