Archive for: December 2006

The "resistance movement" founded by bacteria to combat antibiotics may be losing ground. By combining key properties of two different types of weapons used by the innate defense systems of organisms, a team of scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science has managed to design a more powerful weapon, hoping that this will provide a basis for novel and more effective antibiotics.

A research team at UT Southwestern Medical Center has for the first time identified several genes whose expression is lost in four of the most common solid human cancers -- lung, breast, prostate and colon cancer.

Patients with advanced cancer that has spread to many different sites often do not have many treatment options, since they would be unable to tolerate the doses of treatment they would need to kill the tumors.

Mice with neuroblastoma tumors have been successfully treated with genetically modified cells that sought out the cancer cells and activated a chemotherapy drug directly at those sites, according to investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and their colleagues at City of Hope National Medical Center (Duarte, Calif.) and the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). Neuroblastoma is a solid tumor that arises in the part of the nervous system outside the brain.

Right now there's no rapid way to diagnose sepsis, a fast-moving blood infection that is a leading cause of death in hospital intensive care units. New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that doctors one day could quickly distinguish sepsis from widespread non-infectious inflammation based on genetic profiles of patients' blood.

Recent findings of an observational study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine suggest that men between 65-80 years of age who received treatment for early stage, localized prostate cancer lived significantly longer than men who did not receive treatment. The study is published in the Dec. 13 issue of JAMA.

Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Iowa, recently presented results of a Phase II clinical study indicating that an oral drug, tipifarnib, can stall or reverse disease progression for patients with relapsed aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Nation-wide statistics indicate that while some types of cancer are occurring less frequently, the rates of others are still surging upward. According to a new study published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, incidence of skin cancer is climbing in both sexes -- more men are facing prostate cancer, while more women are diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancers showing a decrease in incidence in both sexes include lung, stomach and colon cancers.

Scientists have discovered that induction of a gene known as MDA-7/IL-24 is the molecular mechanism that enables nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to halt the growth of cancer cells, a finding that could eventually lead to the development of targeted cancer treatments.

Computer scientists are building mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including tasks such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue.