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Tag: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
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Health
Scientists discover new genetic subtypes of common blood cancer
Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and collaborators have identified four distinct genetic subtypes of multiple myeloma, a deadly blood cancer, that have different prognoses and might be treated most effectively with drugs specifically targeted to those subtypes. A new computational tool based on an algorithm designed to recognize human faces plucked the four distinguishing gene…
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Health
Low-dose chemotherapy plus antiangiogenesis drug has activity in advanced breast cancer
Chemotherapy given in low, frequent doses – a novel strategy called “metronomic” delivery – achieved partial shrinkage of disease in some advanced breast cancer patients when given concurrently with an angiogenesis inhibitor, report researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. In a pilot study of 55 patients, the combination of low-dose chemotherapy and the anti-VEGF…
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Campus & Community
Preparing the first ‘Who’s Who in Proteins’
Proteins gone wrong cause most human diseases. Find these mutated proteins, scientists reason, and they are on the way to predicting who will get what disease. They would also learn scads of new biology to help doctors decide when to start available treatments, and to help in the search for additional treatments. Of course, there’s…
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Health
Herceptin treatment lowers recurrence rate in early breast cancer
Encouraging findings came from an interim report from HERA, an ongoing large, international clinical trial of Herceptin, published Oct. 19, 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The analysis was led by Richard Gelber, PhD, of Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who led the statistical analysis for the HERA trial, which is one of…
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Health
Double trouble: Cells with duplicate genomes can trigger tumors
So-called “double-value” cells are produced by random errors in cell division that occur with unknown frequency. The generation of these genetically unstable cells appears to be a “pathway for generating a tumor,” says David Pellman, MD, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber and at Children’s Hospital Boston and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He…
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Health
Subtle changes in normal genes implicated in breast cancer
Scientists found that benign cells surrounding breast cancers undergo epigenetic modifications. The altered gene function causes the microenvironment cells to signal proliferation and increased aggression in the breast tumor cells. Kornelia Polyak, M.D., Ph.D., is senior author of the paper, which was posted as an advance online publication on the Nature Genetics Web site. Min…
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Health
DNA-scanning technology finds possible sites of cancer genes in chromosomes of lung cancer cell
In a study in the July 1, 2005 issue of the journal Cancer Research, the researchers used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array technology to identify regions of chromosomes where genes were either left out or multiplied over and over – mistakes that are often associated with cancer. In this effort, SNP arrays have been used…
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Health
Studies chip away at sex hormone roles in prostate and breast cancers
In recent work, Myles Brown and colleagues combined chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChiP) assays with measures of DNA structure and large-scale gene chip analyses to study where, when, and how androgen and estrogen receptors attach to DNA and control gene transcription. Their results should lead to new ways of manipulating receptor activity and shutting down cancer genes…
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Health
Novel combination overcomes drug-resistant multiple myeloma cells
The researchers hope to move rapidly to clinical trials of the therapy, a combination of the drug Velcade and an experimental compound that was designed by researchers at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The report demonstrates that the combination was more than twice as effective as either drug…
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Campus & Community
New delivery technology paves way for disease therapies
A new way to administer therapeutic RNA molecules that efficiently guides them to cells throughout the body is being reported by researchers at the Harvard-affiliated CBR Institute for Biomedical Research and Harvard Medical School (HMS). The technique couples the homing ability of antibodies and an avid RNA-binding protein from sperm to deploy the RNAs in…
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Health
Insulin prods development of type 1 diabetes
Joslin Diabetes Center researchers Diane Mathis’s and Christophe Benoist’s finding that the lymph node draining the pancreas was intrinsic to the autoimmune response in mice made David Hafler, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wonder if something similar was happening in people. In the May 12, 2005 Nature, he and his colleagues…
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Health
Aspirin use may protect against colon cancer recurrence, reduce risk of death
“Our data are intriguing because they showed that aspirin use notably reduced the risk of recurrence in patients with advanced colon cancer, but more research is needed before any treatment recommendations can be made about the regular use of aspirin,” says Charles Fuchs, M.D., M.P.H., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and lead author…
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Health
Drug combination boosts survival rate in head and neck cancers
Previous studies have shown that using combination chemotherapy of cisplatin and 5-fu yields a 25 to 50 percent rate of complete pathological responses (the tumor disappeared). Robert Haddad, M.D., and his colleagues found that adding the drug docetaxel to the cisplatin and 5-fu regimen significantly increased the complete pathological response rate to 89 percent. Using…
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Health
Left- or right-brain? Genes may tell the story
According to HHMI investigator Christopher A. Walsh, postdoctoral fellow Tao Sun, and their colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, their discovery that a gene called LM04 is expressed differently on the two sides of the brain may help understand how one side of the brain is dominant in most people.…
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Health
T cell misfits may spell autoimmunity
For a would-be T cell, the journey from cradle to grave is likely to be brief. After leaving the bone marrow, the immature immune cell travels directly to the thymus, where it undergoes a winnowing process. To become a mature T cell, it must learn to attack alien proteins and not those peptides produced by…
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Science & Tech
Scientists find molecular pathway suspected in precancerous stomach lesions
Ramesh Shivdasani, M.D., Ph.D., of Dana-Farber, said the finding “opens a window that could help us eventually interfere with these pathways when they become abnormal. It should give us a list of potential therapeutic targets and could even help us to prevent the development of the precancerous lesions.” Patients with the increasingly common disorder known…
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Campus & Community
Blood system forms in the placenta
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) report a surprising finding about embryonic development: The blood system begins to form not only in the embryo itself, but also in the placenta, the organ that nurtures the baby in utero. Experiments in mice revealed that the placenta harbors a large supply of…
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Health
How often should women get mammograms?
With screening guidelines and financial coverage varying among health systems and insurers – sometimes dramatically – a new mathematical model provides quantitative predictions of the mortality benefits, on average, in populations of women over the course of 40 years. “We’re not advocating any particular interval for mammography screening,” says Sandra Lee, a biostatistician at Dana-Farber…
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Health
Long-term Celebrex use increases cardiovascular event risk
The findings prompted the suspension of Celebrex within the Adenoma Prevention with Celecoxib (APC) Trial, in which participants were to take celecoxib or placebo for three years. “These data suggest that there may be an increase in cardiovascular risk associated with the use of celecoxib. This information should be viewed in light of other studies…
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Health
Researchers discover why we go gray
People turn gray, Harvard scientists found, when certain adult stem cells gradually die off. The stem cells provide a continuous supply of other, pigment-producing cells that give your hair its natural color. These same types of pigment cells, called melanocytes, can become cancerous in melanoma, the lethal form of skin cancer that killed about 8,000…
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Health
Study finds women hesitant to take tamoxifen as preventive measure
“Our study underscores the need [for medical professionals] to address psychological factors that may influence decision- making, in order to help women feel confident and satisfied with their treatment choice,” says the study’s lead author, Sharon Bober, PhD, staff psychologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and clinical instructor…
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Health
Study finds that blacks are significantly less likely to undergo prostate cancer screening
In a study involving more than 67,000 men age 65 years and older, the researchers found that blacks were 35 percent less likely than whites to undergo prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing. The American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 30,000 men will die from prostate cancer this year and that 230,000 cases will be diagnosed. The…
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Health
Study yields insights into precancerous condition
Caused by a mutation that inactivates the tumor suppressor gene LKB1, PJS causes gastrointestinal polyps that have a 30 to 50 percent chance of becoming cancerous, says senior author Lewis Cantley, PhD, chief of the Division of Signal Transduction at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and a member of the Department of Systems Biology…
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Health
Study suggests more cancer patients receiving aggressive care at end of life
Researchers reviewed the records of 28,777 Medicare-eligible patients aged 65 and older who died within one year of being diagnosed with lung, breast, colorectal, and other gastrointestinal tumors between 1993 and 1996. They found that during this four-year period, the use of chemotherapy among these patients increased from 27.9 percent to 29.5 percent. Among those,…
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Health
Idea inspires new screening test for anti-cancer agents
In a study published in the December 2003 issue of Cell, investigators from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute demonstrated that a new technique has helped them to identify a class of existing drugs able to kill certain types of cancer cells. “This is an example where one person’s work – that of Bill Sellers [of Medical Oncology]…
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Health
Scientists create lab model of human pancreatic cancer
Currently, nearly all the 30,000 cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed annually are fatal within a matter of months because they are too advanced to remove surgically by the time they cause symptoms. The standard treatments of chemotherapy and radiation are largely ineffective. Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute recently created bioengineered mice that develop aggressive, fatal…
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Health
Enzyme responsible for protein’s ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ personality
Normally, a protein regulates when and how body parts develop, but when mutated, it triggers a rare, often-lethal infant leukemia called mixed lineage leukemia. The newly identified protease enzyme, Taspase1, plays a key role in the MLL protein’s dual-personality. (A protease enzyme cuts protein molecules into smaller pieces). Blocking Taspase1, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers say,…
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Health
Study shows medical schools lack end-of-life training
A study, published by Dana-Farber researchers in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, suggests that increasing medical students’ opportunities to learn about end-of-life care will require not only curriculum changes, but a re-examination of some of the unspoken rules that govern medical education. “The tremendous growth of hospice and palliative…