Cancer News and Discussions

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New biopsy technology for analyzing multiple tumor tissue biomarkers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01- ... issue.html
by University of California, Irvine
A team led by University of California, Irvine researchers has developed a new biopsy technology that can profile multiple tumor microenvironment biomarkers simultaneously, revealing cellular spatial organization and interactions that will help advance personalized disease diagnosis and treatment. Current single-biomarker biopsies lack the ability to analyze many different markers and often fail to predict patient outcomes.

Called the multi-omic, single-scan assay with integrated combinatorial analysis, the fluorescence imaging-based technology can spatially profile a large number of mRNA and protein markers in cells and tissues, including clinical tumor tissues. A study published today in Nature Communications shows that MOSAICA enables direct, highly multiplexed biomarker profiling in a 3D spatial context using a single round of staining and imaging instead of the repeated processing steps typically needed in conventional methods.

Clinicians and scientists will now have a holistic view of the different immune and cancer cell types in tumor tissues, providing greater insight for determining patient prognosis and treatment.

"Spatial biology is a new science frontier and mapping out each cell and its function in the body at both the molecular and tissue level is fundamental to understanding disease and developing precision diagnostics and therapeutics," said Weian Zhao, Ph.D., UCI professor of pharmaceutical sciences and study co-corresponding author. "Many cancer immunotherapeutics, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, don't work and scientists realized that was because of the spatial organization of all the tumor tissue cell types, which dictates drug efficacy. The MOSAICA can characterize the spatial cellular compositions and interactions in the tumor immune microenvironment in biopsies to inform personalized diagnosis and treatment."
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New treatment target identified for radiation-resistant cervical cancer
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-treatment ... ancer.html
by Julia Evangelou Strait, Washington University in St. Louis Beatty / Washington University School of Medicine

Understanding how cells die is key to developing new treatments for many diseases, whether the goal is to make cancer cells die or keep healthy cells alive in the face of other illnesses, such as massive infections or strokes. Two new studies from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a previously unrecognized pathway of cell death—named lysoptosis—and demonstrate how it could lead to new therapies for cervical cancer.

Both studies, which together analyzed data in roundworms, mice and human cells, appear Jan. 12 in the Nature journal Communications Biology.

The blood of patients with cervical cancer and other tumor types is dotted with a protein called SERPINB3. According to the new research, when the gene that manufactures SERPINB3 is absent in cervical cancer cells, the tumor cells die more easily when exposed to the stress of radiation. Similarly, microscopic roundworms called C. elegans that are missing the equivalent gene die more easily when exposed to stresses in their environments.

"It's been known for a long time that high levels of this protein in the blood are a marker of cervical cancer and other squamous cell cancers—the higher the protein levels in the blood, the worse the prognosis," said Stephanie Markovina, MD, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiation oncology.
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Large international evaluation shows AI accurately diagnoses prostate cancer
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01- ... state.html
by Karolinska Institutet

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have together with international collaborators completed a comprehensive international validation of artificial intelligence (AI) for diagnosing and grading prostate cancer. The study, published in Nature Medicine, shows that AI systems can identify and grade prostate cancer in tissue samples from different countries equally well as pathologists. The results suggest AI systems are ready to be responsibly introduced as a complementary tool in prostate cancer care, researchers say.

The international validation was performed via a competition called PANDA. The competition lasted for three months and challenged more than 1000 AI experts to develop systems for accurately grading prostate cancer.
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In the lab: T cells artificially endowed with 2 cancer-seeking receptors aim to be an elite army of cancer killers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01- ... eking.html
by Delthia Ricks , Medical Xpress

Despite high remission rates for patients treated with T cells that are supercharged in laboratories into elite cancer warriors, there is still a considerable population of patients who eventually relapse, their cancers invariably coming back.

It is estimated that CAR T cell therapy—a breakthrough form of cancer immunotherapy—has a 30 percent to 40 percent rate of success for durable remission. That means a significant number of patients aren't quite as lucky. To improve the odds, medical scientists in laboratories worldwide are searching for ways to make CAR T cell cancer therapy work more effectively.

CAR T cells—chimeric antigen receptor T cells—start out as the patients' own T cells isolated from a blood sample, but the cells are primed in a laboratory using a genetic modification process that causes T cells to express a cancer-seeking-and-destroying receptor on their surface.

That special receptor is known as the chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, engineered to bind to a specific target— the cancer's antigen—a molecular complex known as CD19. Cancer cell destruction can be swift—indeed, so much so that the therapy has been known to quickly force some cancers into remission. CAR T cell therapy is used in the treatment of certain cancers of the blood, primarily acute lymphoblastic leukemia, B-cell lymphoma, follicular lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

CAR T cells' population is expanded into a formidable army before being transfused into the patient. A lab grows millions of altered T cells before shipping them back to the patient's hospital. Once returned, the modified T cells are stronger, bolder and cancer-seeking. Bearing the chimeric antigen receptor allows these T cells to hunt down and destroy cancer cells. Because they seek and destroy malignant cells around the clock, some doctors have referred to CAR T cell therapy as "a living drug."
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The first AI breast cancer sleuth that shows its work
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-ai- ... leuth.html
by Ken Kingery, Duke University
Computer engineers and radiologists at Duke University have developed an artificial intelligence platform to analyze potentially cancerous lesions in mammography scans to determine if a patient should receive an invasive biopsy. But unlike its many predecessors, this algorithm is interpretable, meaning it shows physicians exactly how it came to its conclusions.

The researchers trained the AI to locate and evaluate lesions just like an actual radiologist would be trained, rather than allowing it to freely develop its own procedures, giving it several advantages over its "black box" counterparts. It could make for a useful training platform to teach students how to read mammography images. It could also help physicians in sparsely populated regions around the world who do not regularly read mammography scans make better health care decisions.

The results appeared online December 15 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

"If a computer is going to help make important medical decisions, physicians need to trust that the AI is basing its conclusions on something that makes sense," said Joseph Lo, professor of radiology at Duke. "We need algorithms that not only work, but explain themselves and show examples of what they're basing their conclusions on. That way, whether a physician agrees with the outcome or not, the AI is helping to make better decisions."

Engineering AI that reads medical images is a huge industry. Thousands of independent algorithms already exist, and the FDA has approved more than 100 of them for clinical use. Whether reading MRI, CT or mammogram scans, however, very few of them use validation datasets with more than 1000 images or contain demographic information. This dearth of information, coupled with the recent failures of several notable examples, has led many physicians to question the use of AI in high-stakes medical decisions.
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Immunotherapy combination may benefit patients with non-small cell lung cancer resistant to single immunotherapy
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01- ... small.html
by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
A combination of two drugs that open the floodgates to an immune system attack on cancer curtailed tumor growth in some patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that was resistant to a single immunotherapy agent, results from a recent clinical trial show. The addition of radiation therapy to the two-drug regimen did not improve outcomes, however, researchers at Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center and other centers report in a new study.

The paper, published online today by The Lancet Oncology, is part of a broad-based effort to extend the benefits of drugs known as immune checkpoint inhibitors by combining them with other treatments and with one another. The new trial is one of the first to test radiation therapy in combination with immune therapy in patients with cancer. The fact that radiation therapy didn't enhance the effect of the two-drug therapy suggests that future studies should explore different combinations, the study authors say.

"Patients with NSCLC that doesn't respond to checkpoint inhibitors known as PD(L)-1 inhibitors have few treatment options. In this trial, we tested a PDL-1 inhibitor in combination with a drug that targets a different immune checkpoint protein, CTLA-4—an approach that has shown promise in laboratory research but hasn't been extensively tested in patients whose NSCLC is resistant to PD(L)-1 inhibitors," says study lead author Jonathan Schoenfeld, MD, MPH, of Dana-Farber Brigham Cancer Center.

"We not only found that the combination brought the cancer under control in some patients, but our laboratory work suggests a way of determining which patients are likely to have this benefit," he remarked.
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Important new findings about how to test cancer-fighting drugs
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01- ... drugs.html
by Christina Griffiths, Indiana University

Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine are discovering new ways to find out how effective a drug might be against cancer. Their findings are detailed in a new paper published by Science Advances.

"This paper completely changes the way we need to collect tumor tissues and test for drug sensitivity," said Harikrishna Nakshatri, Ph.D., a senior author of the paper. Nakshatri is the Marian J. Morrison professor of breast cancer research at IU School of Medicine and a researcher with the Vera Bradley Foundation Center for Breast Cancer Research at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center. Hal Broxmeyer, Ph.D., a distinguished professor at IU School of Medicine who passed away in December 2021, also contributed to this study.

Typically, tumors are collected and exposed to room oxygen, which is about 21 percent. However, different organs in the body have different oxygen levels. For example, the brain has 4.4 percent oxygen, blood 5.3 percent, and liver 5.4 percent. When cancer drugs are used on tumors in the clinical setting, they're still in a patient's body and are not exposed to ambient air.

"The oxygen level in our different parts of the body is almost half of what we find in ambient air," Nakshatri said. "Oxygen can have a different effect on the function of different proteins in the tumors. They may get activated, lose their activity level, get degraded or get stabilized. We wanted to test the tumors in a way that more closely resembles how they are in the body, so we know more about what drugs to use."
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Major step forward in development of diagnostic blood test for glioblastoma
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01- ... stoma.html
by University of Sussex
Researchers at the University of Sussex are one step further to developing a blood test capable of diagnosing the most aggressive form of brain tumor.

Professor Georgios Giamas and his team, in collaboration with Mr Giles Critchley, Consultant Neurosurgeon and Spinal Surgeon at University Hospitals Sussex, have identified distinctive biomarkers within patient blood samples, which could signal the presence of glioblastoma. The biomarkers (biological signatures for a disease) were identified within extracellular vesicles—small particles which all cells secrete which carry different information, such as DNA or proteins.

The ability to identify these biomarkers within the extracellular vesicles suggests that a liquid biopsy approach could be a viable option for glioblastoma diagnosis, providing both a quicker and less invasive alternative to current diagnostic methods.

More than 11,000 people are diagnosed with a primary brain tumor in the UK each year. Glioblastoma is the most common high grade primary brain tumor in adults, which means it can grow and spread exceptionally quickly. As a result, it's important for diagnosis to be quick, so patients can access treatment as soon as possible.
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MD Anderson and Eisbach Bio Announce Strategic Collaboration to Develop Medicines Targeting Epigenetic Machinery in Oncology
January 18, 2022

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/940086

Introduction to News Release:
(The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Eisbach Bio GmbH via EurekAlert) HOUSTON and MUNICH ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Eisbach Bio GmbH today announced a strategic research collaboration to jointly discover and develop precision oncology drugs that target synthetic lethal engines key to tumor genome evolution.

The agreement aligns the drug discovery and development expertise of MD Anderson’s Therapeutics Discovery division with the innovative discovery platform and allosteric assay technology of Eisbach to generate medicines that selectively disrupt genome replication and DNA repair in cancers harboring defined genetic alterations.

“Modern genomics has revealed synthetic lethal targets in certain cancers with tumor suppressor gene mutations, and Eisbach has developed tools to pinpoint precisely where these targets are vulnerable at the molecular level,” said Adrian Schomburg, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Eisbach. “We are excited to collaborate with MD Anderson to develop innovative targeted therapies that exploit these unique vulnerabilities.”

Synthetic lethality is a phenomenon in which cancer cells with mutations in certain pathways are hypersensitive to drugs targeting related pathways. Notably, defects in certain DNA damage repair pathways – common to many cancer types – render cancer cells dependent on processes that reorganize the cancer genome.

“Cancers harboring mutations in tumor suppressor genes have been notoriously difficult to treat in the past,” said Timothy A. Yap, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., associate professor of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics and medical director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science (IACS) at MD Anderson. “However, growing clinical evidence with PARP inhibitors demonstrates that targeting synthetic lethality is a promising strategy in certain cancer types, and we look forward to continued progress in this space.”
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