A class of drugs used increasingly to help fight cancer may have the additional benefit of protecting the kidneys when packaged with the powerful chemotherapy agent cisplatin. These findings were published by Ranganathan et al in Kidney International. The nearly 40-year-old cisplatin can be a...
Among women with locally advanced or metastatic hormone receptor–positive breast cancer that was resistant to hormone therapy, those who had mutated PIK3CA detected in their blood benefited from a combination of the investigational PI3K inhibitor buparlisib and fulvestrant (Faslodex),...
A study by Chandarlapaty et al investigating whether mutations in the estrogen receptor are common in patients with advanced breast cancer and how they affect patient outcomes has found that the D538G and Y537S mutations in the estrogen receptor 1 (ESR1) gene are prevalent in patients with advanced ...
Two new studies to be reported at the 57th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting highlighted new insights on genetic mutations in children with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) that indicate a higher risk for debilitating chemotherapy-associated bone damage. The study findings were...
Comprehensive molecular characterization of primary papillary renal cell carcinoma, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, showed that type 1 and 2 papillary renal cell carcinomas were distinct types of disease based on differences in genetic...
In a retrospective analysis of data from 130 patients with pancreatic cysts, scientists at Johns Hopkins have used gene-based tests and a fixed set of clinical criteria to more accurately distinguish precancerous cysts from those less likely to do harm. The findings may eventually help some...
Scientists have developed a highly sensitive blood test that can spot when breast cancers become resistant to standard hormone treatment, and have demonstrated that this test could guide further treatment. The test gives an early warning of resistance to aromatase inhibitors, which are used to...
Results of a new laboratory study by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers suggest that some rare “missense” mutations in the HER2 gene are apparently not—on their own—capable of causing breast cancer growth or spread. In a related finding, the research team said...
Patients who develop ovarian cancer appear to have better outcomes if they have a history of oral contraceptive use, according to a study by Mayo Clinic researchers published by Jatoi et al in BMC Cancer. “Multiple studies from a variety of sources have indicated that oral contraceptives are ...
A team of researchers, including scientists from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), has reported that analyzing circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) can track how a patient's cancer evolves and responds to treatment. In a study published in Nature Communications, Muhammed Murtaza, PhD, ...
Australian scientists have identified a critical molecular “feedback loop” that helps initiate and drive neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system in children that is triggered in embryonal nerve cells. This feedback loop massively accelerates cancer development. The research team...
In a phase II trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Mateo et al found that the PARP inhibitor olaparib (Lynparza) produced a high response rate in patients with previously treated metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer with tumors exhibiting defects in DNA repair genes....
Cologuard stool DNA testing for colorectal cancer was found to be an accurate noninvasive screening option for Alaska Native people, a population with one of the world's highest rates of colorectal cancer, concluded researchers from the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and Mayo Clinic. The...
In a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, Ransohoff et al describe genetic evidence of phenotype switching from basal cell to squamous cell carcinoma in a patient receiving vismodegib (Erivedge) for basal cell carcinoma. Hedgehog signaling pathway activation, a central feature of...
Colorectal cancer is on the rise among younger patients. Although some of the younger-onset cases can be explained by hereditary factors, the majority arise spontaneously. Researchers have now found that tumors in younger patients with colorectal cancer may be molecularly distinct from those of...
A rare form of skin cancer known as desmoplasmic melanoma may possess the highest burden of gene mutations of any cancer, suggesting that immunotherapy may be a promising approach for treatment, according to an international team led by University of California San Francisco (UCSF) scientists. One...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved trifluridine/tipiracil (Lonsurf) for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer who have been previously treated with chemotherapy and biologic therapy and are no longer responding to treatment. The new agent is an oral combination of...
There is strong evidence that the protein complex APC/C may function as a tumor suppressor in multiple cancers including lymphoma, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and now, melanoma. A new study has revealed that a genetic mutation leading to repression of a specific protein, Cdh1, which interacts ...
Among patients with clinically stage I or stage II melanoma, those treated with the immune system–boosting agent CpG-B were less likely to experience recurrence of their disease than those who received placebo, according to results from two randomized, placebo-controlled phase II clinical...
For children with rare, aggressive, and advanced cancer, precision medicine may help doctors determine their best treatment options, a new study found. Using information from a patient's entire genome helped to suggest personalized treatment options for nearly half of children with cancer and...
A large European study that combined both population-based and genomic techniques to investigate the heritability of testicular germ cell tumor has found that 48.9% of all the possible factors contributing to risk for the disease are inherited. Rather than being the result of one faulty gene,...
In a dose-escalation phase I study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Reid et al found that RRx-001, a representative of a new class of compounds called dinitroazetidines (sourced from the aerospace industry) that act on the tumor microenvironment, had activity in advanced cancers and a promising...
Scientists have developed a blood test for breast cancer that may be able to identify which patients will suffer a relapse after treatment, months before tumors are visible on hospital scans. The test may uncover small numbers of residual cancer cells that have resisted therapy by detecting cancer...
The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) issued an updated policy statement on genetic and genomic testing for cancer susceptibility. Published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the statement reviews the ways in which new technologies are transforming the assessment and identification of ...
More than a cause of a simple infection, viruses are often involved in the development of serious diseases. Such is the case with liver cancer, which often develops in an organ that has been weakened by hepatitis B or C virus. Researchers at Inserm, the Paris Public Hospitals (AP-HP), Paris...
In a study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Pastore et al found that the addition of mutation status of seven genes to the Follicular Lymphoma International Prognostic Index (FLIPI) and Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status produced a clinicogenetic model (m7-FLIPI) with high ...
A multi-institutional study has found a new set of genes that may indicate improved survival after surgery for patients with pancreatic cancer. The study also showed that detection of circulating tumor DNA in the blood could provide an early indication of tumor recurrence. In conjunction with the...
In a prospective cohort study reported in JAMA Oncology, Rettig et al found that persistent human papillomavirus (HPV) type 16 DNA in post-treatment oral rinses was associated with a poorer prognosis in patients with HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer. The study included 124 patients treated with...
Using whole-exome sequencing on newly diagnosed patients with multiple myeloma, British researchers identified 15 genes that were significantly mutated in a subset of patients and mapped how these mutations related to long-term survival. They found 90% of patients with very aggressive disease who...
In an equatorial African region known as the “lymphoma belt,” children are ten times more likely than in other parts of the world to develop Burkitt lymphoma. This area is also plagued by high rates of malaria, and scientists have spent the past 50 years trying to understand how the two ...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Gara et al identified a germline HABP2 mutation as a susceptibility gene for familial nonmedullary thyroid cancer. Identification of HABP2 Variant In a kindred study, whole-exome sequencing was performed using peripheral blood DNA from affected...
Results of a phase I trial show that an investigational topical drug, resiquimod gel, causes regression of both treated and untreated tumor lesions and may completely remove cancerous cells from both sites in patients with early-stage cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Currently, there is no cure for...
Scientists have known for years that a mutation in the BRAF gene makes moles start to grow but until now have not understood why they sometimes do not become cancerous. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have identified a major genetic factor that...
Although cisplatin-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy before cystectomy is the standard of care for muscle-invasive bladder cancer, only between 25% and 50% of patients achieve a pathologic response. A study investigating biomarkers that can predict response to chemotherapy in patients with...
High-grade serous ovarian cancer often responds well to the chemotherapy drug carboplatin, but it frequently recurs after the first line of treatment. A team of University of California, Los Angeles, researchers has discovered that a subset of tumor cells that don’t produce the protein CA125, ...
A large-scale genetic study of the links between telomere length and risk for five common cancers found that long telomeres are associated with an increased risk of lung adenocarcinoma. No significant associations between telomere length and other cancer types or subtypes were observed. The study,...
The stem cells in the gut divide so fast that they create a completely new population of epithelial cells every week. However, this quick cell division is also why radiation and chemotherapy wreak havoc on the gastrointestinal systems of patients with cancer, as such therapies target rapidly...
A “pill on a string” developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge could help doctors detect esophageal cancer at an early stage, helping them overcome the problem of wide variation between biopsies, suggests research published by Ross-Innes et al in Nature Genetics. The...
In a retrospective study reported in The Lancet Oncology, Tabernero et al used commercially available BEAMing technology to assess plasma tumor DNA and protein levels in a subgroup of patients from the CORRECT trial of regorafenib (Stivarga) in metastatic colorectal cancer and examined the...
A study published by Bianchi et al in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that genetic test results revealed by noninvasive prenatal testing for fetal chromosomal abnormalities may detect underlying conditions in the mother, including cancer. The study reports on a case...
Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University reported finding a single molecule that appears to be the central regulator driving metastasis in prostate cancer. The study, published by Goodwin et al in Cancer Cell, offers a target for the development of a drug that could prevent metastasis in prostate ...
On the hunt for better cancer screening tests, Johns Hopkins scientists led a proof-of-principle study that successfully identified tumor DNA shed in the blood and saliva of 93 patients with head and neck cancer. A report on the findings was published by Wang et al in Science Translational...
A protein encoded by the gene glypican-1 (GPC1) present on cancer exosomes may be used as part of a potential noninvasive diagnostic and screening tool to detect early pancreatic cancer, potentially at a stage amenable to surgical treatment, according to a study completed by University of Texas MD...
Metastatic colorectal cancer patients have improved survival rates when they respond to the first line of chemotherapy their doctors recommend. To better predict how patients will respond to chemotherapeutic agents before they begin treatment, researchers at University of California (UC) San Diego...
The results of a nearly 10-year investigation that identified a key gene mutation that can trigger acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and several other types of cancer were recently published by Noetzli et al in Nature Genetics. The findings have, for the first time, pinpointed a mutation that...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Beltran et al found that whole-exome sequencing of metastatic and treatment-resistant cancers revealed biologically informative alterations in the majority of cases. Although treatment recommendations could be made in the majority of cases, treatment was guided ...
A single dose of the recombinant human papillomavirus (HPV) bivalent (types 16 and 18) vaccine (Cervarix) appears to be as effective in preventing certain HPV infections as three doses, the currently recommended course of vaccination, concluded a study published by Kreimer et al in The Lancet...
Scientists at multiple institutions have found a new way of classifying brain cancers that could very well change how the illness is diagnosed and treated. The study, a project of The Cancer Genome Atlas, found striking molecular differences between various forms of gliomas by looking at the makeup ...
A study by Dahlstrom et al investigating the usefulness of serum antibodies to human papillomavirus (HPV)-16 DNA antigens as predictors of survival for patients with oropharyngeal carcinoma has found that E1, NE2, and E6 antibody positivity were all strongly associated with improved overall and...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cole et al found that polymorphisms in genes related to oxidative stress or neuroinflammation were associated with poorer cognitive function in survivors treated for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Survivors of childhood ALL...