New Way to Fight Therapy-Resistant Prostate Cancer Found

Scientists have identified a signalling circuit in cells that can be targeted to treat advanced prostate cancer in patients who are resistant to existing therapies. Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of death after lung cancer in American men, researchers said. Currently, the most effective treatment for advanced prostate cancer is to deprive the cancer of what feeds it – androgen hormones, such as testosterone. However, almost all patients eventually develop resistance to this therapy, leaving doctors with no options to counteract the inevitable. The study at The Scripps Research…

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Cocktail of diabetes and hypertension drugs kills cancer cells

A combination of drugs for diabetes and hypertension may offer an effective new way to combat cancer, suggests a new research. In their experiments, the researchers found that the combination of the diabetes drug metformin and the antihypertensive drug syrosingopine drives cancer cells to programmed “suicide”. “We have been able to show that the two known drugs lead to more profound effects on cancer cell proliferation than each drug alone,” said study first author Don Benjamin from the University of Basel in Switzerland. “The data from this study support the…

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​Why cancer treatments cause collateral damage in kids

When exposed to cancer treatment like chemotherapyand radiation, brain and heart tissues in very young children are more prone to apoptosis or programmed cell death, researchers said. Apoptosis, in which molecular signals order cells to self-destruct, plays an important role in deciding the “fate” of a developing cell. These toxic treatment stressors put young children at high risk for developing severe, long-lasting impairments in their brain, heart, the study said. But active apoptosis in the early brain “also sets the stage for extremely high sensitivity to any type of damage…

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Older women with breast cancer still left out of medical trials

Older women are still underrepresented in medical trials evaluating treatments for breast cancer, according to a new study. Of three different types of trials evaluated by researchers, only one had an increase in enrollment of older women with breast cancer between 1985 and 2012. The other two had decreases. Seeing how older people react to cancer therapies “is crucial to inform decision-making and to optimally serve patients’ medical, emotional, and functional needs,” the authors of the study write in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, online December 19. “As physicians and…

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Older women with breast cancer still left out of medical trials

Older women are still underrepresented in medical trials evaluating treatments for breast cancer, according to a new study. Of three different types of trials evaluated by researchers, only one had an increase in enrollment of older women with breast cancer between 1985 and 2012. The other two had decreases. Seeing how older people react to cancer therapies “is crucial to inform decision-making and to optimally serve patients’ medical, emotional, and functional needs,” the authors of the study write in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, online December 19. “As physicians and…

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Laser therapy with deep-sea drug kills prostate cancer cells

A non-surgical treatment for lowrisk prostate cancer, in which doctors inject a light-sensitive drug derived from deep-sea bacteria into a patient’s bloodstream, was shown in a trial to kill cancer cells without destroying healthy tissue. Results of a trial in 413 patients showed that the drug, which is activated with a laser to destroy tumour tissue in the prostate, was so effective that half the patients went into remission, compared with 13.5% in a control group.”These results are excellent news for men with early localised prostate cancer, offering a treatment…

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