http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. Advanced metastatic melanoma is a disease that has proven difficult to eradicate. Despite the success of melanoma-targeting drugs, tumors inevitably become drug resistant and return, more aggressive than before. In the current issue of the journal Cancer Cell, however, researchers at The Wistar Institute describe how they increase the effectiveness of anti-melanoma drugs by combining anticancer therapies with diabetes drugs. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-06-diabetes-drug-resistance-melanoma.html Cancer Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:07:45 EST news290185658 University of Southampton biological scientists are leading a major research project aimed at making drugs more effective. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-ways-combat-drug-resistance.html Medical research Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:00:25 EST news283586417 (Medical Xpress)—Bioengineering researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara have found that changing the shape of chemotherapy drug nanoparticles from spherical to rod-shaped made them up to 10,000 times more effective at specifically targeting and delivering anti-cancer drugs to breast cancer cells. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-chemotherapy-drugs-cancer-cells.html Cancer Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:56:32 EST news281199376 In laboratory studies, scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have developed a way to personalize chemotherapy drug selection for cancer patients by using cell lines created from their own tumors. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-02-scientists-method-personalize-chemotherapy-drug.html Cancer Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:00:01 EST news280070682 Using two successive pairs of specialized CT scans, a team of Johns Hopkins and Dutch radiologists has produced real-time images of liver tumors dying from direct injection of anticancer drugs into the tumors and their surrounding blood vessels. Within a minute, the images showed whether the targeted chemotherapy did or did not choke off the tumors' blood supply and saved patients a month of worry about whether the treatment, known as chemoembolization, was working or not, and whether repeat or more powerful treatments were needed. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-paired-ct-scans-chemo-killing-liver.html Cancer Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:46:34 EST news276248547 A novel approach to identifying potential anticancer drug combinations revealed that pairing cholesterol-reducing drugs called statins with cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitors might provide an effective approach to treating intractable melanomas driven by mutations in the NRAS and KRAS gene. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-screening-approach-potential-drug-combos.html Cancer Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:44:16 EST news274617850 A completely new way of delivering anti-cancer drugs to tumours, using 'minicells' derived from bacteria, has been tested for the first time in humans and found to be safe, well-tolerated and even induced stable disease in patients with advanced, incurable cancers with no treatment options remaining. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-trial-humans-minicells-anti-cancer-drugs.html Cancer Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:00:03 EST news271613615 Scientists for the first time have evidence showing how a widely used type of "targeted" cancer drug can be dangerous to the heart. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-temple-cancer-drug-stunt-heart.html Cardiology Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:37:55 EST news271424198 (Medical Xpress)—Can HIV be transformed into a biotechnological tool for improving human health? According to a CNRS team at the Architecture et Réactivité de l'ARN (RNA Architecture and Reactivity) laboratory, the answer is yes. Taking advantage of the HIV replication machinery, the researchers have been able to select a specific mutant protein. Added to a culture of tumor cells in combination with an anticancer drug, this protein improves the effectiveness of the treatment at 1/300 the normal dosage levels. Published in PLoS Genetics on 23 August 2012, these findings could lead to long-term therapeutic applications in the treatment of cancer and other pathologies. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-aids-virus-cancer.html Genetics Wed, 29 Aug 2012 07:55:40 EST news265445555 Researchers in Leuven (VIB/KU Leuven) have confirmed their hypothesis that normalizing blood vessels by blocking oxygen sensor PHD2 would make chemotherapy more effective. They also demonstrated for the first time that this strategy would reduce the harmful side effects of chemotherapy on healthy organs. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-scientists-uncover-strategy-chemotherapy-side.html Cancer Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:21:51 EST news264158505 A team of scientists at McMaster University has discovered a drug, thioridazine, successfully kills cancer stem cells in the human while avoiding the toxic side-effects of conventional cancer treatments. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-thioridazine-cancer-stem-cells-human.html Cancer Thu, 24 May 2012 12:00:26 EST news257076581 The goal of cancer treatment is to match the right drug to the right target in the right patient. But before such "personalized" drugs can be developed, more knowledge is needed about specific genomic alterations in cancers and their sensitivity to potential therapeutic agents. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-volume-cancer-cell-line-encyclopedia.html Cancer Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:00:09 EST news252150949 In the largest study of its kind, researchers have profiled genetic changes in cancer with drug sensitivity in order to develop a personalised approach to cancer treatments. The study is published in Nature on Thursday 29 March 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-path-personalized-cancer-treatment.html Cancer Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:00:03 EST news252151008 Proteins belonging to the large and important family of ABC transporters have been associated with metabolic diseases and can cause resistance to antibiotics. Biochemists from the University of Zurich and the NCCR Structural Biology have succeeded in determining the atomic structure of a new ABC transporter. The insights gained could give rise to new therapies to treat multi-resistant bacteria, cystic fibrosis or gout, for instance. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-hot-trail-metabolic-diseases-resistance.html Medical research Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:06:56 EST news252148005 Mitochondria, tiny structures within each cell that regulate metabolism and energy use, may be a promising new target for cancer therapy, according to a new study. Manipulation of two biochemical signals that regulate the numbers of mitochondria in cells could shrink human lung cancers transplanted into mice, a team of Chicago researchers report in the journal FASEB. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-02-energy-network-cells-cancer-therapy.html Cancer Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:00:01 EST news249043340 Molecular probes that can illuminate cancer cells are often invaluable tools in the fight against the disease. The latest addition to this group is a family of fluorescent probes that can highlight a particularly pernicious kind of tumor cell: those resistant to anticancer drugs. The international team of scientists behind the research, led by Hiroshi Abe at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Wako, Japan, and Ralf Morgenstern at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, say that their discovery could help expedite research efforts to defeat these drug-resistant tumors. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-spotlight-drug-resistant-tumors.html Cancer Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:50:03 EST news242635282 Doses of a neurotransmitter might offer a way to boost the effectiveness of anticancer drugs and radiation therapy, according to a new study led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-neurotransmitter-cancer-treatment.html Cancer Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:00:11 EST news242316296 Delivering anticancer drugs into breast ducts via the nipple is highly effective in animal models of early breast cancer, and has no major side effects in human patients, according to a report by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers in Science Translational Medicine on October 26. The results of the study are expected to lead to more advanced clinical trials of so-called intraductal treatment for early breast cancer. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-10-through-the-nipple-breast-cancer-therapy-early.html Cancer Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:00:01 EST news238855423 (Medical Xpress) -- The discovery of the mechanism of action behind a novel class of anticancer drugs designed to disrupt cancer cell mitochondrial metabolism may be a major step toward furthering clinical trials of the agents. An analysis of CPI-613, the lead compound in this first-in-class group of anticancer drugs developed by Paul M. Bingham, Ph.D., Associate Professor, and Zuzana Zachar, Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor, both in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, is published in the Journal of Molecular Medicine. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-mechanism-action-cancer-agents-tumor.html Cancer Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:48:59 EST news230874523 Several chemicals that can accumulate to high levels in our body (for example BPA and some pesticides) have been recently linked to an increased risk of cancer and/or impaired responsiveness to anticancer drugs. A team of researchers, led by Sridhar Mani, at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, has now identified a potential mechanistic link between environmental exposure to these foreign chemicals (xenogens) and cancer drug therapy response and survival. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-pxr-stone-environmental-chemical-cancer.html Cancer Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:53:42 EST news229607612 Today's anticancer drugs often work wonders against malignancies, but sometimes tumors become resistant to the effects of such drugs, and treatment fails. Medical researchers would like to find ways of counteracting such resistance, but first they must understand why and how it happens. New findings by Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers identify one protein, Abcc10 (also known as Mrp7), as being intimately involved in resistance to certain drugs used to treat breast, ovarian, lung, and other cancers. The results suggest that blunting the activity of Abcc10 might help counter resistance and extend the effectiveness of these anticancer drugs. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-abcc10-effective-effectiveness-anticancer-drugs.html Cancer Mon, 16 May 2011 09:58:57 EST news224758722