Scientists at The University of Nottingham have isolated three important genes involved in the development of a type of childhood brain cancer. The breakthrough is revealed in a study published in the British Journal of Cancer.

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Combining the new drug trabectedin with pegylated liposomal doxorubicin provides clinical benefit to women with relapsed ovarian cancer, according to new results presented at the 33rd Congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Stockholm.

The combination, which importantly does not include a platinum drug, challenges the current standard of treatment for women whose cancer recurs at least 6 months after first-line treatment, said Associate Prof. Bradley J. Monk from the University of California Irvine Medical Center.

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Scientists and clinicians from around the world will gather in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, next week at the American Association for Cancer Research’s third International Conference on Molecular Diagnostics in Therapeutic Development.

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People who carry a particular genetic variant are at significantly increased risk of developing malignant melanoma, new research shows.

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Nanoparticles filled with a drug that targets two genes that trigger melanoma could offer a potential cure for this deadly disease, according to cancer researchers. The treatment, administered through an ultrasound device, demonstrates a safer and more effective way of targeting cancer-causing genes in cancer cells without harming normal tissue.

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Intracellular hypoxia has been linked to genetic instability, tumour progression and poor prognosis. Little is known about the effect of hypoxia on DNA-dsb sensing and repair. We tested whether the sensing of DNA-dsbs and chromatin biology is decreased in cells irradiated under continual hypoxic or anoxic conditions. To test this hypothesis, we used normal diploid fibroblast strains, GM05757, synchronised in G0-G1 to preclude DNA replication as a source of DNA repair foci.

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The integral membrane protein Caveolin-1 forms small invaginations of the plasma membrane, so-called caveolae, for serving in endo-exocytosis and is involved in regulating signaling from integrins and receptor-tyrosine kinases. Both, integrins and receptor-tyrosine kinases, are considered to confer radioresistance and chemoresistance of tumours. Integrins are responsible for interactions of cells with their surrounding extracellular matrix, transmit extracellular signals to control survival, proliferation or apoptosis, and have been demonstrated to transduce prosurvival signals via the cytoplasmic protein kinase AKT. The aim of this study was to evaluate the distinct role of Caveolin-1 in radiation survival of human pancreatic tumor cells and its putative interaction with the widely expressed ß1 integrin using a three-dimensional (3D) cell culture model, which mimics physiological growth conditions in contrast to the conventional 2D cell culture.

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Pancreatic cancer is the fifth most common cause of cancer death in Japan. The prognosis is extremely poor because it is difficult to detect this disease in the early stages and also the postoperative incidence of recurrence is still high, and we have not had any effective treatment for inoperable patients. Recently, chemoradiotherapy has been regarded as one of the standard therapies for locally advanced pancreatic cancer and it has improved survival and presented a clinical benefit. In the early 1980s, fluorouracil-based concomitant chemoradiotherapy was shown to be better than radiotherapy alone for patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer. Gemcitabine has improved the outcome of patients with advanced disease by increasing survival with a clinical benefit. Gemcitabine also has been shown to be a potent radiosensitizer both in vivo and in vitro. The vast majority of the reported phase I-III clinical trials have used gemcitabine as a single agent given weekly in a single dose (i.e. 250 mg/m2), and there is no consensus of the protocol of the administration of gemcitabine. Several preclinical data including animal studies would suggest that maximum radiation sensitization with gemcitabine is observed at a lower dose administered twice weekly.

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Doctors around the globe are turning more and more to the use of stereotactic body radiosurgery (SBRT) for the treatment of cancer and other conditions. Using the Novalis Tx platform from Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR) and BrainLAB, doctors are performing image-guided radiosurgery to treat tumors of the brain, spine, lung, and liver, without a single incision in the patient. This advanced technology is on display this week at both the 50th annual meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Boston, and at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons 2008 meeting in Orlando, Florida.

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Endometrial carcinoma is the most common gynecological malignancy among postmenopausal European women. Patients with high-intermediate risk endometrial cancer (based on age, tumour stage and grade) who receive no further treatment following surgery, have an approximately 20% risk of developing a locoregional recurrence, of which 75% are located in the vagina and 25% in the pelvic lymph nodes. Postoperative pelvic external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) significantly reduces the rate of locoregional recurrence to 5% at five years.

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