Tag: Brain Tumor

Researchers have discovered a novel consequence of loss of the tumour protein p53 that promotes cancer development, according to new findings in eLife. The study in mouse and human cells, from the Netherlands Cancer Institute, suggests that multiplication of cancer cells in the absence of appropriate growth stimuli is supported by the additional loss of

A phase I clinical trial investigating the use of bacterial Clostridium novyi-NT spores as an injectable monotherapy had manageable toxicities and showed early clinical efficacy in patients with treatment-refractory solid tumor malignancies, according to data presented at the Fourth CRI-CIMT-EATI-AACR International Cancer Immunotherapy Conference: Translating Science into Survival, held Sept. 30-Oct. 3. “Even after a

Cancer needs energy to drive its out-of-control growth. It gets energy in the form of glucose, in fact consuming so much glucose that one method for imaging cancer simply looks for areas of extreme glucose consumption — where there is consumption, there is cancer. But how does cancer get this glucose? A University of Colorado

About every five seconds or so we close our eyes and blink to moisten them. During this brief moment no light falls on our retina yet it is not constantly dark and we continue to observe a stable picture of our environment. The brain seems to remember the percepts that have just happened. Caspar Schwiedrzik

Zombie cells are the ones that can’t die but are equally unable to perform the functions of a normal cell. These zombie, or senescent, cells are implicated in a number of age-related diseases. And with a new letter in Nature, Mayo Clinic researchers have expanded that list. In a mouse model of brain disease, scientists

A new cell culture platform allows researchers to observe never-before-seen behaviors of live cancer cells under the microscope, leading to explanations of long-known cancer characteristics. The easy-to-produce platform developed by Hokkaido University researchers offers cancer cells micro-scale attachment sites that elicit never-before-seen behaviors highly relevant to cancer’s clinical properties. The observation of these behaviors shed

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is widely known to cause nearly all cases of cervical cancer. However, you might not know that HPV also causes 70 percent of oropharyngeal cancer, a subset of head and neck cancers that affect the mouth, tongue, and tonsils. Although vaccines that protect against HPV infection are now available, they are not

A team of Hokkaido University scientists studied the molecules involved in mitochondrial movements within highly invasive breast cancer cells. They identified a pathway that ultimately leads to the dispersion of these energy-generating organelles towards the cells’ periphery, increasing cancer invasiveness. When this pathway was blocked, mitochondria aggregated within the cell’s center, where they started overproducing

By developing a novel decoding technology, a team of engineers and physicians at the University of Southern California (USC) and UC San Francisco have discovered how mood variations can be decoded from neural signals in the human brain — a process that has not been demonstrated to date. Their study, published in Nature Biotechnology, is

Insights into how harmful white blood cells form during tuberculosis infection point to novel targets for pharmacological interventions, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Valentina Guerrini and Maria Laura Gennaro of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and colleagues. Foam cells are a type of white blood cell, known as

Cancer researchers struggle to identify tumor cells that are interspersed within nonmalignant tissues because tumor cells exploit the tissue environment and monopolize available resources to continue growing. Researchers attribute cancer cell’s ability to use cell signaling and metabolic pathways that override normal cell growth restrictions to complicated chemical exchanges between tissue and tumor cells. A

A UCLA-led study has found that a treatment that uses a bacteria-like agent in combination with an immunotherapy drug could help some people with advanced melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, live longer. The research showed that using the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab and the experimental agent SD-101, a sequence of nucleic acids that mimics

A new combination of existing drugs shows promise that it could reduce the size of cancerous tumors much more effectively than current treatments. As cancer patients know all too well, many highly effective anti-cancer drugs don’t stay effective long. Most tumors will become drug resistant over time as their cells rapidly mutate. Chemists from The

An international team of researchers has uncovered a destructive mechanism at the molecular level that causes a well-known phenomenon associated with obesity, called leptin resistance. They found that mice fed a high-fat diet produce an enzyme named MMP-2 that clips receptors for the hormone leptin from the surface of neuronal cells in the hypothalamus. This

In the first experiment of its kind, scientists have revealed the precise identity of cancer cells of the most common childhood and adult kidney cancers. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge, University of Newcastle and their collaborators showed that the cancer cells are versions of specific healthy cells from developing or

A Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) research team has used epigenome editing tools to investigate how the genetic abnormality that drives Ewing sarcoma — the second most common bone cancer in children and young adults — unleashes tumor growth. In their paper in the journal Genes & Development the researchers show that blocking the fusion protein

Researchers have found that women who play soccer may be more at risk than their male counterparts. According to a new study published in the journal Radiology, female soccer players exhibit more extensive changes to brain tissue after repetitive ‘heading’ of the soccer ball. Soccer is the most popular competitive sport in the world, and

Aging vessels connecting the brain and the immune system play critical roles in both Alzheimer’s disease and the decline in cognitive ability that comes with time, new research reveals. By improving the function of the lymphatic vessels, scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have dramatically enhanced aged mice’s ability to learn and

A deadly feature of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is its invasion of the central nervous system. ALL in the central nervous system is very difficult to treat, because most drugs are blocked from the organ system due to a “blood-brain barrier” designed to protect the brain. How cancer cells enter the central nervous system has

A new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has identified some of the first known inherited genetic variants that significantly raise a person’s likelihood of developing clonal hematopoiesis, an age-related white blood cell condition linked with higher risk of certain blood cancers and cardiovascular