The DNA in our cells is constantly under assault from oxygen, the sun’s radiation and environmental stresses. Most of the time, our cells can repair the damage before it gets copied into a permanent mutation that could lead to cancer.

Adding a wrinkle to our understanding of how cancers begin, scientists have found that cells can turn on tumor-promoting growth circuits as a result of misreading damaged DNA without copying it: a process called “transcriptional mutagenesis.”
Read the rest of this entry »

The American Cancer Society - the nation’s leading voluntary health organization and largest non-governmental funder of cancer research and discovery - will present its highest honor, the Medal of Honor, to four Americans who have made outstanding contributions to the fight against cancer. This year’s winners, who will receive their awards at a ceremony during the American Cancer Society’s annual meeting in New York City, are: The Honorable Edward M. Kennedy, United States Senator from Massachusetts, for Cancer Control; Mina J. Bissell, Ph.D., for Basic Research; Susan Band Horwitz, Ph.D., for Clinical Research; and Jon M. Huntsman for Cancer Philanthropy. The Medal of Honor, originally called the American Cancer Society Award, was first given in 1949.

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy will be awarded the Medal of Honor for Cancer Control. Sen. Kennedy (D-Mass.) is one of the great champions in the legislative fight against cancer. Throughout his more than 40 years in the U.S. Senate, he has fought tirelessly for health care-related causes, from equal access to health care to increased funding for cancer research and early detection cancer screenings. By authoring legislation on a variety of issues, Time magazine, in a 2006 article, speculated his work has affected the lives of virtually every “man, woman and child in the country.”

Sen. Kennedy has been a passionate supporter of cancer research funding from his early days in office. As chairman of the Senate’s health subcommittee in 1971, he led the passage of the National Cancer Act, which is widely considered the most dramatic piece of health legislation ever enacted. Representing a concerted national campaign against cancer, the law authorized increased funding for federal cancer research; today, it enables funding of more than $4 billion per year for federal cancer research.

The senior Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Sen. Kennedy has used his leadership to positively affect the status of the nation’s health. He has fought for cancer-related issues such as tobacco control, patient navigator funding, and cancer prevention and early detection.

Sen. Kennedy has long had a commitment to fighting cancer. To raise awareness of early detection, he co-sponsored resolutions designating National Mammography Day in October and September as National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. He was a co-sponsor of the original legislation for the 1992 Mammography Quality Standards Act to ensure the safety and accuracy of mammograms, and in 2004 he helped introduce the reauthorization bill, which allowed appropriations for grants to evaluate screening programs. In 2002, Sen. Kennedy co-sponsored legislation to help uninsured Native American women suffering from breast and cervical cancer benefit from federal and state resources for treatment. He has also worked to improve access to colon cancer screenings and has supported research and education related to blood cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma.
Read the rest of this entry »

A man from Banbury near Oxford, England, said his dog sniffed out his skin cancer, reminiscent of reports of trials that have shown dogs can detect cancer, in some cases even when screening tests can’t.
Read the rest of this entry »

Cardiovascular conditions leading to heart attacks and strokes are treated quite separately from common cancers of the prostate, breast or lung, but now turn out to involve some of the same critical mechanisms at the molecular level. This in turn provides clues to more effective therapies for both cancer and cardiovascular diseases, but requires researchers in these distinct fields to come together. The seeds were sown for closer cooperation between these two groups at a recent workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF), which also highlighted the striking progress already made in understanding key common mechanisms underlying both disease categories.
Read the rest of this entry »

NanoMedical Systems Inc., (NMS), an Austin-based startup cofounded by Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSC-Houston), to improve the effectiveness of anti-cancer agents and other medications, has received a record $3.5 million Commercialization Award through the Texas Emerging Technology Fund (ETF).

NMS was one of six companies that received the ETF awards, which were announced by Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Tuesday, Nov. 18.

The grant will help accelerate the completion of engineering and pre-clinical testing for a device, which will allow for a controlled dose of medicine to be released into the bloodstream over many weeks or months. The device will be a safer, more reliable and less costly alternative to a long series of injections or clinical visits.
Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping germs from cooperating can delay the evolution of drug resistance more effectively than killing germs one by one with traditional drugs such as antibiotics, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

John W. Pepper proposes a new strategy in the arms race between humans and germs — targeting the teamwork within gangs of germs.

Most drugs used to fight infections kill the vulnerable disease-causing organisms, or pathogens, but the resistant ones survive. The next generation will all carry the resistance to the drug.
Read the rest of this entry »

UroToday.com - The Munich Cancer Registry (MCR) was established in 1978 as the clinical registry of the Munich Cancer Centre and in the beginning cooperated with the two University hospitals in Munich. Since 1988 collaborations have extended to all hospitals in the city and district of Munich, monitoring 2.3 million people. The enrolment area was extended by the Bavarian Cancer Registration Law up to a region with 3.8 million inhabitants in 2002 and 4.4 million inhabitants in 2007. The MCR and its data shall be considered population-based at least since 1988.

These results in metastatic renal cell cancer (RCC) show the minor progress in therapy with slight improvements in median survival (13.2 months in 1978-87 and 15.6 months since 2002) and 5-year relative survival (17 % in 1978-87 and 21 % since 2002) as it has found access in the treatment of the broad population. The lack of detailed information about individual therapies can demonstrate the limitation of these population-based data, but nevertheless, remarkably effective therapies must be represented in population-based data.
Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth T. H. (Terry) Fontham, MPH, DrPH, Dean of the LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans School of Public Health, became the first non-physician elected national President of the American Cancer Society when she was inducted at a special ceremony during the Society’s National Assembly Meeting on November 20, 2008 in New York City. She will also be the first epidemiologist and the third female to serve as president in the organization’s 96-year history.
Read the rest of this entry »

The earlier cancer is diagnosed, the better the chance of effecting a cure. A revolutionary new hybrid technology offers the possibility of detecting this and other diseases right at inception.

Within a few years, when the technology comes to market, every doctor’s surgery could have a small, inexpensive device which can test blood on the spot and warn of impending illness before any symptoms become apparent.

With a head start of billions of years over human scientists, nature has developed incredibly complex organisms, tools and systems which we are still struggling to understand let alone emulate.

Put simply, there are things evolution has achieved that people can only dream of. And among these are natural diagnostic tools which help us to recognise when something foreign, a cold virus say, has invaded our bodies and to fight it.

When we have a sore throat and a runny nose, it means our body has identified a disease invasion, diagnosed exactly what the disease is, and created antibodies to fight it. We might feel bad, with our bodies being the battlefield, but after a few days the antibodies win out, the cold virus is neutralised, and equilibrium returns.

Nature’s tools

Scientists have known for some time how the body sets about diagnosing the problem. But the process is so complex, and takes place at such a microscopic level, it has been impossible for us to replicate it to help in the fight against diseases like cancer which the body cannot usually beat off by itself.

An ambitious EU-funded research project, which goes by the acronym of RECEPTRONICS, is taking an unconventional approach by harnessing nature’s tools and combining them with the best of nanotechnology and electronics to produce a revolutionary new method of disease detection.

At the heart of the process is molecule recognition, and specifically recognising individual molecules, something the human body does all the time. For medical purposes, the type of molecule which needs to be recognised is called a biomarker, and its presence can indicate a disease is starting well before there are any other symptoms.

In order to recognise biomolecules, nature has developed receptors, which are mirror images of the molecules being sensed. Every single type of biomolecule has its own receptor in nature.

New level of precision

The researchers on the project have brought together their different disciplines, including biochemistry, bioengineering, nanotechnology and information technology to replicate this process and develop a hybrid device. Results to date show the technology the project has developed is far more precise than anything else which is being used, which allows for much earlier detection of biomarkers.

Explains project coordinator Professor Marco Tartagni of the University of Bologna (IT): “The idea is to use bioengineering to harness the natural biological process for molecule recognition, and to put it together with state-of-the-art electronics.
Read the rest of this entry »

Screening for colorectal cancer detects four out of ten cancers and should be carefully designed to be more effective, according to a study published today on bmj.com.

About one in 20 people in the UK develop bowel cancer during their lifetime. It is the third most common cancer in the UK and the second leading cause of cancer deaths in Europe and the US.

Previous screening trials have show that faecal occult blood testing can reduce the risk of dying by about 16%. More than 50 countries have introduced screening programmes, but their effectiveness in a public health setting is not clear.
Read the rest of this entry »