New discoveries about the genetic roots of gout may lead to new gout treatments and new tests to gauge a person’s risk of developing gout.
Researchers including Abbas Dehghan, MD, of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands report that news in tomorrow’s online edition of The Lancet.
Dehghan’s team studied gene data from three long-term health studies that together included more than 26,700 participants in the U.S. and the Netherlands.
A new experimental breast cancer vaccine has been proven to make mice reject tumors, including cancers that are no longer sensitive to Herceptin. This new vaccine targets breast cancers that grow wildly in reponse to the growth factor named HER-2. Approximately 25% of women that have breast cancer have HER-2 positive tumors. The medication Herceptin, which is a man-made antibody for treatment for patients with breast cancer, targets these specific cancers. However, after some time these tumor cells often become resistant to Herceptin.
Wei-Zen Wei (PhD), who is a professor of immunology at Detroit’s Karmanos Cancer Insitute, said that the experimental vaccine elicits immune responses that terminate HER-2 postitive breast tumors in mice, whether or not the cells have become resistant to Herceptin. “Regardless of whether tumor cells are resistant, if immune cells are properly primed by immunization we can destroy these cells.”
Valencia biotechnology company MannKind Corp. thought it had encouraging news about its experimental insulin inhaler on Tuesday. But Wall Street wasn’t buying it.
For months, skeptical traders have expressed concern that the diabetes drug, if approved by the Food and Drug Administration, might end up with an FDA cancer advisory. Fears that the inhaler would never take off were still lurking Tuesday, even though MannKind said that trials of its Technosphere insulin delivery system showed no elevated cancer risk.
Analysts said those concerns helped push the company’s stock down 14% to $2.92 on Tuesday. MannKind shares have fallen 54% since April 1.
Researchers have identified a new genetic player in the development of colon cancer.
The findings implicate CDK8, a protein that regulates gene expression in the proliferation of colorectal cancer, the researchers found.
Should the results be validated, they could lead to new therapeutic approaches for colon cancer, as well as new screening and chemopreventative strategies, said Dr. Durado Brooks, director of prostate and colorectal cancer at the American Cancer Society.
Mammograms have long been the gold standard for detecting breast cancer, but they still miss as much as 15 percent of tiny tumors, usually located in dense breast tissue.
"We need a better way to detect cancer in the 25 percent of women over the age of 40 who have dense breasts," said Dr. Edward Coleman of Duke University Medical Center.
Molecular breast imaging, or MBI, is the latest experimental approach.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US chemists have identified the odor that emanates from skin cancer, a development that researchers hope will advance diagnosis and treatment of the deadly disease, said a study out Wednesday.
The creation of a “profile” of the chemical odors linked to skin cancer, may lead to a day when diagnoses can be made by waving a scanner over the skin, researchers told the annual conference of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Read more
CANCER KILLER?: A biotech company, Micromet, has designed an antibody-based drug that seems to seek out and kill cancer cells.
Scientists have developed a two-pronged protein that grabs immune system cells with one arm and introduces them to cancer cells it has snagged with the other. The result: eradicated tumors—at certain doses.
The technology is only in early human clinical trials, but if it proves effective, this new antibody—a protein employed by the immune system to ferret out foreign invaders—could offer way to stop non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, a type of cancer, in its tracks.
More than 65,000 Americans have been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma thus far in 2008, according to the National Cancer Institute, and nearly 20,000 have died from it. The standard care for this type of cancer is a course of the antibody-based drug Rituxan combined with four chemotherapy agents; the latter compounds often kill normal cells, along with cancerous ones.
Researchers at Bethesda, Md.–based biotechnology company Micromet, Inc., report in this week’s Science that in a 38-person trial designed primarily to determine the safety of their drug blinatumomab (which incorporates the protein), 11 showed significant responses to therapy that included a shrinking of cancerous lymph nodes. Read more
Federal drug regulators Friday approved a medication to treat a major symptom of Huntington’s disease, marking the first time since the disorder was first described in a Long Island family 136 years ago that any kind of treatment has been available in the United States.
In Huntington’s, a rare, devastating condition, brain cells degenerate because of a genetic miscue easily passed from one generation to the next. The disorder results in jerky, involuntary movements known as chorea.
The drug tetrabenazine controls the chorea, which affects about 90 percent of people with the disease. It was approved under the Food and Drug Administration’s orphan products program, which is aimed at developing treatments for conditions affecting fewer than 200,000 people. Huntington’s disease affects 30,000 people nationwide. Read more
