Dr Penna

A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has just published research identifying an enzyme called Brk that may serve as a target for future drugs developed to fight ErbB2-positive tumors. ErbB2 is a member of a family of enzymes called receptor tyrosine kinases — cell-surface molecules that goad cells into proliferating when they sense growth cues in the environs of cells that express them. It turns out that the over-production of ErbB2 in breast cancers is due to a gene mutation that results in the accumulation of multiple copies of the erbB2 gene.

Other genes that undergo such “amplification” due the duplication of DNA segments include brk, which is the gene that instructs cells to manufacture the enzyme Brk. This enzyme is absent in healthy cells but is found at high levels in a majority of breast cancers. As some of these cancers also over-express ErbB2, the CSHL team wondered whether the offending genes, erbB2 and brk, are mutated in tandem, or “co-amplified.” This idea in turn raised the possibility that the proteins encoded by these genes are also co-activated and feed into the same proliferation-promoting pathway.

Aside from hurrying along tumor progression, Brk was also found to diminish the effectiveness of ErbB2-inhibiting drugs on tumor growth. Brk-inhibitors might also be useful on their own or as combined with ErbB2 inhibiting drugs. The CSHL scientists speculate that these drugs might fight tumors that never react to or become resistant to ErbB2-inhibitors.

To day I saw an interesting post in Reuters news it talks about narrative medicine. It is about Emotional writing which helps to make feel better. Link

Some cancer patients may find that putting their emotions down in writing helps improve their pain and general well-being, a study suggests.

Such writing, part of a concept called “narrative” medicine, has been seen as a way to aid communication between seriously ill patients and their doctors.

But the act of writing, itself, may also help patients better understand themselves and their needs, according to the study team, led by Dr. M. Soledad Cepeda of Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.

To look at the question, they randomly assigned 234 cancer patients to one of three groups: one that was asked to perform narrative writing; one that filled out a standard questionnaire about pain symptoms; and one that stayed with standard care only.

We all know about dogs being able to detect criminals and boms so on. Intrestingly I found news article about cancer sniffing dog. This news article also includes another break through where South Korean firm cloned four puppies from tissue sample taken from Cancer sniffing dog.

A South Korean firm said Monday it has successfully cloned four dogs capable of sniffing out human cancers by using tissue from a retriever in Japan.

The four black retrievers were born last month from cloned foetuses of Marine, a six-and-a-half-year-old dog trained in Japan to detect cancer patients by smell, RNL Bio said in a statement.

Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have created a new probe that can be used to monitor immune system and its response to therapies. They achieved this by altering molecular structure of Gemcytabine and adding radiolabel for this molecule. The uses of this probe include monitoring immune system in cancer patients, and also monitoring immune response during conventional or novel cancer treatment modalities like tumor vaccines.

 
 Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have modified a common chemotherapy drug to create a new probe for positron emission tomography (PET), an advance that will allow them to model and measure the immune system in action and monitor its response to new therapies….

…Researchers created a small molecule, called FAC, by slightly altering the molecular structure of one of the most commonly used chemotherapy drugs, gemcitabine. They then added a radiolabel so the cells that take in the probe can be seen during PET scanning….

….”Dynamic probes like the one developed by UCLA scientists will allow researchers to learn more about the role of the immune response in cancer, how current treatments affect immune cells, and will allow them to quantitatively monitor responses to new modalities such as tumor vaccines,” Shannon said. “Probes of this type may also help oncologists more rapidly identify tumors that will respond to certain drugs so treatments can be made more patient-specific.”….

We all know that breast feeding by mother reduces incidence of breast cancer in her. But new reserach suggest that women who were breast fed when they were infants had low incidence of breast cancer later in their life

Adult women who were breast-fed as infants may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than those who were not breast-fed, unless they were first-born, study findings suggest.

“As a general group, women who reported they had been breast-fed in infancy had a 17 percent decrease in breast cancer risk,” Hazel B. Nichols, who was involved in the study, told Reuters Health.

“However, we did not observe this reduction when we looked specifically among first-born women,” said Nichols, of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. link

US Blacks Continue to get inferior treatment compare to whites when it comes to management of life threatening cancer. Check from medical news website.

Racial disparities persist in U.S. cancer treatment Check from Reuters

…..Black patients were consistently less likely than whites to receive the recommended types of treatment, the study found, and the problem was just as bad in 2002 as in 1992…..