Posts tagged: Cancer

MRI detects early effects of chemotherapy on children’s hearts

Lisa Phelps on June 10, 2013 at 10:12 am - 0 Comments

Guest blog post by Professor Mike McConnell, Stanford University School of Medicine, USA.

Chemotherapy can injure heart muscle, leading to heart failure, but this damage may not be apparent until many years later. Children receiving chemotherapy are of particular concern, as the risk of heart failure increases as they age into adulthood. A safe, noninvasive method to detect this damage could identify high risk patients and prompt earlier preventive therapy.

In an article published today in Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada present their result from a study looking at MRI of the heart in 30 children two years after chemotherapy. They found changes in the heart muscle even though overall …

Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer launches with BioMed Central

Philip Dooner on May 30, 2013 at 8:15 am - 0 Comments

June is Cancer Immunotherapy Awareness Month, an initiative to increase the public’s awareness of the revolutionary new treatment approach. Cancer immunotherapy utilises the immune system to fight the disease and represents the most immediate hope for curing patients with any type of cancer. BioMed Central and the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) are therefore pleased to announce the timely launch of the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (JITC), an open access, peer reviewed journal that encompasses all aspects of tumor immunology and cancer immunotherapy, from basic research through to clinical applications.

As the official journal of SITC, JITC will be the cancer immunotherapy community’s prime forum to discuss the critical issues in tumor immunology and cancer …

Infectious Agents & Cancer announces new ‘Clinical oncology’ section

Philip Dooner on May 21, 2013 at 2:56 pm - 0 Comments

Clinical oncology in Western countries is currently characterized by preventative programs (which include early diagnosis), combined treatments (radio-chemo-surgery), reconstructive surgery, and, more recently, by tailored treatment with monoclonal antibodies or specific inhibitors based on newly identified cancer biomarkers. Clinical oncology in the rest of the world, which represents 85.3% of the Earth’s population, has different priorities, strategies and aims, which are often difficult to compare. Major differences are not only due to the different socio-economical conditions and the national health programs, but also to disparities in cancer burden and their etiopathogenesis, as well the population-based genetic susceptibility. A further major difference is the age-distribution of the population. In the Western world, the population is very much aged, with people aged …

Early pregnancy alters gene signature of mammary stem cells

Kathryn Smith on May 3, 2013 at 12:05 pm - 0 Comments

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the United Kingdom and constitutes the leading cause of cancer-related death in women worldwide. One in eight women can expect to develop breast cancer at some point in their lifetime.

Progress has been made in early detection and treatment of breast cancer but little is understood about how women can reduce their risk of developing the disease. Child-bearing is one factor identified to reduce this risk. If a full-term pregnancy occurs before the age of 20, the risk of developing breast cancer is halved. Yet the mechanism through which this works remains unexplained.

A new publication in Breast Cancer Research uses a novel approach to answer this …

Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound begins to make waves in a growing field

Shane Canning on April 25, 2013 at 11:11 am - 0 Comments

Today sees the launch of Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound in partnership with the Focused Ultrasound Foundation and the International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound adding to the growing number of society journals in the BioMed Central portfolio.

Therapeutic ultrasound (also known as focused ultrasound) has the potential to be an alternative or complement for radiation therapy, the means to dissolve blood clots, and a way to deliver drugs in extremely high concentrations to a precise point in the body. It has the potential to treat of a variety of serious medical disorders, including cancer, uterine fibroids, essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

Journal of Therapeutic Ultrasound encompasses all aspects of therapeutic ultrasound, namely, …

Understanding HPV-positive carcinoma for better outcomes

Maria Hodges on February 21, 2013 at 5:04 pm - 0 Comments

Head and neck cancer is the sixth most common cancer worldwide, and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is the most frequent form. Certain subtypes of HNSCC, such as oropharyngeal carcinoma, are infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), and patients with these HPV-positive tumors have a better prognosis than patients without and respond better to chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

To understand why the HPV-positive patients do better, a team from University College London led by Stephan Beck examined the differences in methylation patterns by sequencing HPV-positive and HPV-negative samples, and the results were recently published in Genome Medicine.

As frozen HNSCC samples are hard to get hold of, the UCL team instead developed a method that …

Call for papers: Infectious Agents & Cancer announces series on Burkitt Lymphoma

Philip Dooner on February 7, 2013 at 9:55 am - 0 Comments

Franco M Buonaguro and Sam M Mbulaiteye, Editors-in-Chief of Infectious Agents & Cancer, would like to invite you to submit your manuscript to a new thematic series, entitled “Burkitt Lymphoma, Beyond Discoveries” which will be published in the journal.

Burkitt Lymphoma (BL) is an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) that was first described by Dennis Burkitt in 1958 in Ugandan children. Since then, numerous breakthroughs, including the discovery of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and its links to the disease, have been made. The most important of these discoveries has been the demonstration of curability of lymphoma which has re-invigorated efforts to use chemotherapy to treat cancer and helped establish some of the key principles of chemotherapy for …

miRNA biomarkers in osteosarcoma: crossing a new bridge

Andreia Cunha on January 22, 2013 at 3:08 pm - 0 Comments

Osteosarcoma is the most common type of bone tumor, but the lack of good biomarkers to predict the outcome of standard treatment has so far prevented patient stratification and therapy evolution. Gene expression signatures, including microRNA (miRNA) profiles, have been suggested to have predictive value for the response of a tumor to chemotherapy, but the limited availability of frozen tissue samples has hindered development of signatures with prognostic value for recurrence and survival. Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue (FFPE) is the standard sample used by histopathological laboratories but it has proved very challenging to use this for reliable expression-profiling.

This problem has now been overcome by Dimitrios Spentzos and colleagues, whose study was recently published in Genome Medicine. The …

Latest issue of Genome Biology

Andrew Cosgrove on January 10, 2013 at 6:39 pm - 0 Comments

Following on from Naomi’s blog on the highlights of 2012 in Genome Biology, I’m going to expand on her mention of our cancer articles. We published four cancer-related articles in December: two Research, and two Methods.

Jinghui Zhang and colleagues from the St Jude Hospital in Memphis, together with collaborators from Washington University, St Louis and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, have assessed the telomere content of a large panel of pediatric cancers. Telomeres are the specialized structures at the ends of chromosomes that, in normal cells, shorten with every cell division. Once they have shortened to reach a critical length threshold, the cells are unable to divide further. Since cancer is a disease …

Immunotherapy goes broad at BioMed Central

Philip Dooner on January 10, 2013 at 10:32 am - 0 Comments

In September 2009, Journal of Translational Medicine (JTM) and the then International Society for the Biological Therapy of Cancer (iSBTc) launched the Tumor Immunology and Biological Cancer Therapy section in the journal and with it JTM became a venue for the discussion of hot issues in tumor immunology which were highly relevant to translating novel immune interventions. Launched at a turning point in cancer immunotherapy, when considerable advances in understanding the relationship between the immune system and cancer started to translate to pioneering active immunotherapies, the section and journal quickly grew under the guidance of Section Editor Pedro Romero, and the renamed Society for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (SITC), to become a …