Early data from a clinical study suggest that blocking the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) protein provided clinical benefit to a small group of patients with severe COVID-19. Researchers observed that the off-label use of the cancer drug acalabrutinib, a BTK inhibitor that is approved to treat several blood cancers, was associated with reduced respiratory distress and a reduction in the overactive…
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered a way to move precision immunotherapy forward by using genomics to inform immunotherapy for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, according to a study published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, in December. This is the first study to experimentally determine which…
For the first time, researchers from Helmholtz Zentrum München and the University Hospital of LMU Munich show that deep learning algorithms perform similar to human experts when classifying blood samples from patients suffering from acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Their proof of concept study paves the way for an automated, standardized and on-hand sample analysis in the near future. The paper was…
Researchers at the University of Birmingham have shown that it’s possible to produce a compound with anti-cancer properties directly from feverfew – a common flowering garden plant. The team was able to extract the compound from the flowers and modify it so it could be used to kill chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) cells in the laboratory. Feverfew is grown in many UK gardens, and also…
Oxford Gene Technology (OGT), A Sysmex Group Company, has celebrated the opening of its new facility in Cambridge, UK. The opening ceremony, which took place at the company’s new premises on the prestigious Cambridge Science Park, was attended by the Department for International Trade (DIT) and local media as well as top-level representatives from OGT and its parent company, Sysmex Corporation.…
Stem cells are surrounded and protected by the stem-cell niche – the microenvironment – of the tissue in which they are found. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have mapped the stem-cell niche in the bone marrow of mice and studied how it is influenced by developing leukemia. Their results, which are published in the journal Cell, show that the bone-marrow microenvironment is more complex…
New findings about a fatal form of blood cancer could aid the development of new drugs with significantly less harmful side effects than existing chemotherapy. The discovery could lead to novel treatments that efficiently eliminate blood cancer cells in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), without harming healthy blood cells. Researchers have discovered how a protein in the body plays a key role in AML…
Mariette Barbier, an assistant professor in the West Virginia University School of Medicine, and her research team are investigating ways to keep cystic fibrosis patients and other at-risk populations—including patients hospitalized for severe burns or recovering from major surgery—from catching this deadly illness.
Flow cytometry has proved an invaluable diagnostic tool for leukaemia and lymphoma for almost three decades. Now, however, this is evolving in applications to seek out residual disease in cases and in fusion with molecular testing to advance its diagnostic potential. However, although recognised as fast, flexible and accurate, flow cytometry suffers from a lack of standardisation, according to…
For the first time, a team of international researchers have mapped the family trees of cancer cells in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) to understand how this blood cancer responds to a new drug, enasidenib. The work also explains what happens when a patient stops responding to the treatment, providing important clues about how to combine enasidenib with other anti-cancer drugs to produce…
Two major projects feeding on big data and based in Spain have recently come under the spotlight: Mendelian, a tool to expedite rare diseases diagnosis, and Harmony, an EU platform that aims to improve targeted therapy in haematological cancer. Rare diseases affect as many as 6% of the Spanish population. Although this percentage is high, these conditions are individually rare, which complicates…
A team of researchers in Italy and Austria has determined that a drug approved to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) may be less effective in a particular subset of patients. The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, reveals that ibrutinib has a diminished capacity to delocalize and kill tumor cells expressing an adhesive protein called CD49d, but combining ibrutinib…
Bio-Rad Laboratories announces the launch of the "QXDx BCR-ABL %IS" Kit, the first CE-IVD digital PCR test that can monitor the molecular response of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) to therapy.
Researchers in Germany have demonstrated that hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplants can be improved by treatments that temporarily prevent the stem cells from dying.
A protein found in the edible mushroom known as "shaggy ink cap" might be able to kill a type of leukemia cell, new research suggests.
Finding a cure for a rare type of blood cancer could be accelerated by a new virtual platform that allows researchers easy access to data from patient samples generated by laboratories around the world. LEUKomics, which has been launched by scientists at the University of Glasgow and the University of Melbourne, is a comprehensive database describing over 100 chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML)…
A team of UCLA bioengineers has demonstrated that its technology may go a long way toward overcoming the challenges of treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, among the most common types of cancer in children, and has the potential to help doctors personalize drug doses.
After nearly two decades of unsuccessful attempts, researchers from the University of Chicago Medicine and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have created the first mouse model for the most common form of infant leukemia. Their discovery could hasten development and testing of new drug therapies.
Researchers at The University of Manchester have unlocked the potential of a new test which could revolutionise the way doctors diagnose and monitor a common childhood Leukaemia. Dr Suzanne Johnson says that cancerous acute lymphoblastic leukaemia cells produce and release special structures that can be traced in the blood. The discovery could have major implications on the diagnosis, monitoring,…
Australian researchers have made a world-first breakthrough in the early detection of patients' resistance to a common treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia. The discovery offers some hope that the patients' treatment could be changed sooner to improve their chances of survival.
For patients with an often-deadly form of leukemia, new research suggests that lingering cancer-related mutations – detected after initial treatment with chemotherapy – are associated with an increased risk of relapse and poor survival.
Cancer specialists everywhere increasingly face new findings from molecular biology. Genetic profiling of tumours opens up entirely new perspectives on the disease. How to cope with and integrate new insights into cancer diagnosis and treatment was among key issues discussed at the 2nd European Forum on Oncology, held in Berlin this May
Susanne Werner reports on the views and revelations of international researchers gathered to deliberate the future potential of reprogrammed human adult stem cells and personalised medical treatments
Reliable Cancer Therapies (RCT) celebrates the first anniversary of its website in style. The Swiss non-for-profit organization has completed comprehensive guides for cancer patients and their relatives, which are now available on its website.
An examination of the world-wide use of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), which involves transplantation of blood stem cells derived from the bone marrow or blood, finds that there are significant differences in transplant rates between countries and continental regions by indication and donor type, and that HSCT is most frequently used in countries with higher gross national…