Researchers outline a new minimally invasive and inexpensive blood test that can identify cancer in patients with non-specific symptoms and whether these cancers have metastasised in the body.
Mark Nicholls reports from the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) virtual Festival, with four expert speakers discussing the role of liquid biopsy in cancer detection.
Researchers have identified a mechanism that impairs the proliferation of cancer cells and induces their death without affecting healthy cells. This could lead to improved cancer treatment.
Artificial intelligence (AI) models that evaluate medical images have potential to speed up and improve accuracy of cancer diagnoses, but they may also be vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Bitter taste receptors do not only support humans in tasting. They are also found on cancer cells. A team led by Veronika Somoza from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna and the German Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich has investigated the role they play there. For this purpose, the scientists compiled and evaluated extensive…
In multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, relapse almost always occurs after treatment. Initially, most patients respond well to therapy. However, as the disease progresses, resistant cancer cells spread in the bone marrow, with fatal consequences for the patients. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD) and the National Center for…
PET/MRI is offering new imaging opportunities for cancer patients at various points along the care pathway with its ability to assess different biological processes and its increased specificity.
Professor Regina Beets-Tan, President of the European Society of Radiology (ESR), looks on possible future developments in cancer imaging. AI is very promising in this regard, 'However, it has proven to be a problem that the data with which the artificial intelligence is fed must be very homogeneous,' the expert observes.
Focused ultrasound waves create microbubbles in a fluid – a phenomenon called cavitation. In a current study, this process is used to destroy liver tumors and metastases. In this Medica-tradefair.com interview, Prof. Maciej Pech talks about testing cavitation events generated during histotripsy, explains the process, and reveals its advantages.
The immune system protects the body from cancer. To protect healthy body cells from its own immune system, they have developed a protective shield: the protein CD47 is a so called "don’t eat me" signal, which tells the immune cells to stand back. Tumor cells exploit this CD47-based protection strategy for evading the immune system, by increasing presentation of CD47 on their cell…
Mass spectrometry – a powerful tool for analysing the molecular composition of a tissue sample – is invaluable during cancer surgery. However, mass spectrometers are complex and unwieldy, and certainly a poor fit for an operating room (OR). To create a bridge between the lab and OR, Professor Livia S Eberlin, from Baylor College of Medicine, has developed a very special ‘pen’.
A new approach to ‘prime’ the tumour environment may improve how effective chemotherapy is for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, one of the most aggressive forms of pancreatic cancer. In preclinical models, a team at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research could enhance the tumours’ response to chemotherapy by reducing the stiffness and density of the connective tissue known as the stroma,…
Hokkaido University scientists and colleagues in Japan have found a way that could help some patients overcome resistance to an immunotherapy treatment for cancer. The approach, proven in mice experiments, was reported in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer.
Over the past decade, scientists have been exploring vaccination as a way to help fight cancer. These experimental cancer vaccines are designed to stimulate the body’s own immune system to destroy a tumor, by injecting fragments of cancer proteins found on the tumor.
By analysing secondary acute myeloid leukaemias, researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) Barcelona have detected mutations caused by platinum-based chemotherapies in cells that were healthy at the time of treatment. Treatment with chemotherapies influences the development of blood cells, favouring clonal hematopoiesis from cells with pre-existing mutations. The study has…
Pancreatic cancer is a disease of the elderly: the average age of patients is 72. In Austria, about 1,600 people are diagnosed each year. Since pancreatic cancer has no specific symptoms, it is not usually diagnosed until the tumor is locally advanced or has already metastasized. Once the tumor has metastasized, it is usually no longer treatable by surgery or radiotherapy. In addition, the drug…
A new technology that can study which therapies will work on patients with solid cancerous tumours has been developed by scientists at University College London (UCL). Researchers say the tool, which can rapidly test tumorous tissue against different treatments, such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy or radiotherapy, could be used by clinicians to pinpoint the best therapy for a particular patient.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki could show for the first time that normal human fibroblast cells can be converted to specific cancer cells using only factors that are commonly detected in actual human patients. Previous studies have achieved this only by using powerful viral factors that are not common in human cancers. Since many human cancer types still lack specific diagnostic…
Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, have identified a new growth factor produced by blood vessels that enables tumor cells to metastatically colonize organs.
A solid diagnosis has always been the first step on any patient’s journey to health. However, diagnostic categories are necessarily oversimplifications. In the last decades, medical professionals and scientists have begun to uncover the true variability in patients’ physiological and biochemical make-up that is the principal cause for individual variations in the way diseases present…
The goal of tumour conferences is to determine the best treatment for patients with complex cancers – however, the patient is rarely present. Now, a team of researchers has investigated whether cancer patients can benefit from participating in these meetings.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have 3D-printed a first-of-its-kind glioblastoma tumor that mimics a living cancer malignancy, powering new methods to improve treatment and accelerate the development of new drugs for the most lethal type of brain cancer. Glioblastoma is notoriously fatal as it accounts for the majority of brain tumors and is highly aggressive. The average survival time of…
To avoid adverse reactions, personalised laboratory medicine can help to predict a patient’s drug response. Investigations based on DNA and other omics technologies – e.g. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics – along with microarray technologies, is making a particularly valuable contribution to cancer care, in which personalised approaches are becoming possible through…
A new study from the University of Helsinki shows that cells that are freshly isolated from lung cancers can be used to create robust drug response data. This approach can identify actionable or non-responsive treatments, illustrated by a case study in which the assay was used to guide the compassionate treatment of a patient.
For the first time, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have shown how cancer cells reprogram themselves to produce lactic acid and to tolerate the acidic environment that exists around tumors. The finding could lead to a whole new direction for treating cancer. The breakthrough is the result of more than 13 years of work. The next step in research could…