Cancer News and Discussions

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New immunotherapy for leukemia discovered

by Karolinska Institutet
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... kemia.html
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital have developed a new kind of immunotherapy for leukemia. The results of a study published in Nature Biotechnology show that the therapy kills cancer cells from patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The researchers now want to conduct a clinical study and also test the method on other types of cancer.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common form of childhood leukemia, affecting approximately 70 children a year in Sweden. The disease is characterized by the unregulated growth of immature white blood cells, an essential component of the immune system, in the bone marrow and suppression of other healthy blood cells.

The condition is normally treated with chemotherapy or, in severe cases, bone marrow transplantation or immunotherapy, involving the genetic modification of the patient's own T cells to make them attack another type of white blood cell called B cells. However, the therapy, known as CAR-T after the name of the genetically modified receptor, only works on patients with B-cell leukemia and not those with T-cell leukemia, which affects an estimated 15 to 20 percent of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Side effects can also occur, as healthy B cells can also be affected.
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Maharashtra: MIMER develops nano robot for rapid cancer diagnosis
The new nano robot-based diagnostic tool is likely to help improve cancer treatments and enable early interventions, a scientist at MIMER said.
https://indianexpress.com/article/citie ... s-7655710/
By: Express News Service | Pune |
Maharashtra Institute of Medical Education and Research (MIMER), Pune has developed a nano robot that is programmed to capture and isolate circulating tumor cells. The tool is expected to lead to a new rapid and accurate diagnostic method for cancer, said Dr Shashwat Banerjee, Scientist at MIMER Medical College at Talegaon Dabhade in Pune.

“In search of better cancer diagnostics, scientists from MIMER, Pune, synthesized multifunctional nanorobot using magnesium-iron oxide Janus nanoparticles. The reported nano robot tested on blood containing a low number of cancer cells exhibited ~100% capture efficiency in less than five minutes. The nano robot was further clinically validated by testing it on a cancer patient’s blood samples and it exhibited rapid and efficient circulating tumour cells (CTC) capture ability,” Dr Banerjee said in a statement.

The findings were published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Chemistry under the title ‘Water-Powered Self-Propelled Magnetic Nanobot for Rapid and Highly Efficient Capture of Circulating Tumor Cells’.

This new nano robot-based diagnostic tool may help in improving cancer treatments, allow for better treatment control, enable early interventions and change decision-making from reactive actions towards more predictive early interventions, he added.
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It's not all in their DNA: Cancer cells with the same genome can behave differently
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... ently.html
by University of New South Wales
Scientists have tracked and analyzed cancer cell behavior with a novel cellular "barcoding technology."

For the first time, research has shown cancer cells with the same genetic blueprint won't necessarily behave in the same way, with serious implications for how we target them.

A Peter Mac-led study involving a UNSW scientist demonstrating these non-genetic changes in acute myeloid leukemia cells was published today in Nature.

Joint first author Dr. Katie Fennell says: "We developed a novel cellular barcoding technology that can track individual cancer cells over time and identify patterns that lead to different cell behavior—even when the underlying genome is the same."

This barcoding technology (dubbed SPLINTR, which stands for Single-cell Profiling and LINeage TRacing) helps the researchers to identify the unique genes expressed in each leukemia cell, and monitor how this influences the cancer's behavior over time. They can then observe which acute myeloid leukemia cells are most likely to form cancerous tumors.

UNSW scientist and co-author Dr. Emily Wong, who is based at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, says the fact that regulatory changes are key contributors to disease in the absence of genetic mutations is only starting to be widely recognized.

"The Dawson Lab has developed an exciting method to track the regulatory genome of individual cancer cells over time. We are pleased to be able to contribute our computational analyses to this major advance."

While this study is in acute myeloid leukemia, the technology can be applied to many different cancers, presenting an opportunity to understand why some tumor cells survive drug treatment or relapse in specific organs.
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Asthma may reduce risk of brain tumors—but how?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... rsbut.html
by Washington University School of Medicine

There's not much good that can be said about asthma, a breathing disease in which the airways become narrowed and inflamed. But there's this: People with asthma seem to be less likely to develop brain tumors than others. And now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis believe they have discovered why.

It comes down to the behavior of T cells, a type of immune cell. When a person—or a mouse—develops asthma, their T cells become activated. In a new mouse study, researchers discovered that asthma causes the T cells to behave in a way that induces lung inflammation but prevents the growth of brain tumors. What's bad news for the airways may be good news for the brain.

The findings, available online in Nature Communications, suggest that reprogramming T cells in brain tumor patients to act more like T cells in asthma patients could be a new approach to treating brain tumors.

"Of course, we're not going to start inducing asthma in anyone; asthma can be a lethal disease," said senior author David H. Gutmann, MD, Ph.D., the Donald O. Schnuck Family Professor of Neurology. "But what if we could trick the T cells into thinking they're asthma T cells when they enter the brain, so they no longer support brain tumor formation and growth? These findings open the door to new kinds of therapies targeting T cells and their interactions with cells in the brain."
Well, this is something! :|
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Potentially serious side effect seen in patient after immunotherapy

by The Mount Sinai Hospital
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... erapy.html
Mount Sinai scientists have become the first to report a potentially serious side effect related to a new form of immunotherapy known as CAR-T cell therapy, which was recently approved for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Their findings were published as a case study in Nature Medicine in December.

Multiple myeloma is a complex and incurable type of blood plasma cancer that often requires multiple treatments as the disease progresses and becomes resistant to previous therapies, often resulting in chronic disease with periods of acute illness.

CAR-T cell therapy uses genetically engineered immune system cells known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. In the specific version at issue, the CAR-T cells were used to target a protein known as B cell maturation antigen (BCMA). BCMA is commonly found in multiple myeloma, and this therapy has shown impressive response rates in people with particularly complex, treatment-resistant multiple myeloma.

More than three months after finishing a course of BCMA-targeted CAR-T cell therapy, the patient described in the Mount Sinai case study started showing progressive neurological features of symptoms resembling Parkinson's disease, including tremors as well as handwriting and gait changes. The patient later died due to complications from infection, and researchers found evidence of BCMA protein in the brain's basal ganglia and scarring in that area, suggesting that this serious side effect may have been due to the therapy targeting the BCMA in the brain.
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Early-stage lung cancer may soon be detectable from a drop of blood
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... blood.html
by Massachusetts General Hospital

Lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death, is usually diagnosed at a late stage when the survival rate is extremely low. Early-stage lung cancer is mostly asymptomatic, and low-dose spiral CT imaging, the current method for detecting early lung cancer lesions, isn't feasible as a widespread screening test for the general population due to high cost and the radiation hazard of repeated screenings.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides proof-of-concept for the ability of a drop of blood to reveal lung cancer in asymptomatic patients. The study was co-led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH): Leo Cheng, Ph.D., associate biophysicist, in Pathology, Radiology, and the Athinsula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging; and David Christiani, MD, MPH, pulmonary and critical care physician.

"Our study demonstrates the potential for developing a sensitive screening tool for the early detection of lung cancer," says Cheng. "The predictive model we constructed can identify which people may be harboring lung cancer. Individuals with suspicious findings would then be referred for further evaluation by imaging tests, such as low-dose CT, for a definitive diagnosis."
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Microspheres delay progression of colon cancer
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... ancer.html
by Will Doss, Northwestern University
Targeted radioembolization alongside chemotherapy improved progress-free survival for patients with colon cancer that had metastasized to the liver, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Most patients with colorectal liver metastases (CLM) are poor candidates for resection surgery, so this new treatment could be a better option compared to chemotherapy alone, according to Mary Mulcahy, MD, '00 GME, professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology and lead author of the study.

"We know systemic chemotherapy will ultimately fail, so we're looking for non-surgical therapy that can address these patients," said Mulcahy, who is also a professor of Radiology and of Surgery in the Division of Organ Transplantation and associate director of clinical operations at the of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

Riad Salem, MD, chief of Vascular and Interventional Radiology and vice chair of image guided therapy in the Department of Radiology, and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, was senior author of the study.

About 60 percent of patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer will eventually have their cancer spread, with the liver being the main site of spread. While the cancer in the colon is often treatable by surgical resection, diffuse liver metastases are much less amenable to surgical treatment.
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Potential role of gas plasma in leukemia treatment
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... kemia.html
by Huntsman Cancer Institute

A unique collection of tissue samples donated by people with chronic myeloid leukemia was the driving force behind the discovery of a potentially major new treatment approach for drug-resistant leukemia. As published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report how a laboratory study of a specially engineered formulation of gas, composed of charged and highly reactive molecules, called "cold atmospheric plasma," or CAP, was highly effective in targeting drug-resistant leukemia cells while protecting nearby healthy cells.

There are many types of leukemias that arise in bone marrow cells. While research has led to major improvements in the survival of adult and child leukemia patients, some leukemias that were at one time responsive to treatment become resistant to the drugs used to target them. Therefore, scientists are working to improve treatment options for leukemia patients by understanding the characteristics of aggressive leukemias that are more likely to develop drug resistance.

The study was powered by a unique resource at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah (U of U) called the HCI Hematology Biobank. This resource provided patient-donated leukemia samples with the precise characteristics needed to conduct the study to determine how CAP blocks strategies leukemia cells use to survive.
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Researchers develop a smart probe for early tumor diagnosis

by University of Science and Technology of China
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... nosis.html
As 5-year relative survival rates differ greatly between cancer patients treated at early or late stages, early detection of tumors is of great importance to cancer therapy. Cathepsin B (CTSB) is considered as a potential biomarker for the early diagnosis of cancers due to its increased expression in the early stage of many cancer types. As a result, the effective and precise monitoring of CTSB activity offers a way out.

In a recent study published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a research team led by Prof. Liang Gaolin and Prof. Yuan Yue from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized the specific photoacoustic (PA) imaging of CTSB-overexpressing tumors through CTSB-initiated intracellular self-assembly of small-molecule PA imaging probes into nanoparticles.

PA imaging is a new type of non-invasive and non-ionizing biomedical imaging method, which has a huge potential in biomedical research and disease diagnosis due to its excellent tissue-penetrating depth and high spatial resolution.

To meet the challenge of early tumor detection, the researchers, using the self-assembly signal enhancement of PA imaging probe, designed a CTSB-activatable near-infrared PA probe Val-Cit-Cys(SEt)-Lys(Cypate)-CBT (Cypate-CBT). When Cypate-CBT enters CTSB-overexpressing tumor cells, its disulfide bond is reduced by intracellular glutathione and its specific cleavage substrate Val-Cit is cleaved by CTSB to produce Cypate-CBT-Cleaved, which undergoes an intermolecular CBT-Cys click reaction to yield Cypate-CBT-Dimer. The Cypate-CBT-Dimer then self-assembles into near-infrared nanoparticles Cypate-CBT-NPs.
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Study demonstrates a novel approach to target enhancer-addicted cancers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12- ... ncers.html
by University of Michigan
While researchers have identified several genes that drive prostate cancer, a new study published in Nature reveals the puppet master controlling the strings.

The strings: Cancer-causing genes, or oncogenes, such as androgen receptor, FOXA1, ERG and MYC.

The puppet master: A chromatin remodeling complex called SWI/SNF, which controls the way in which DNA is arranged and compacted to fit within a cell's nucleus. A key subunit of this complex provides energy to unwrap DNA to provide access to enhancer elements that crank up the expression of cancer-driving genes.

In the current study, researchers at the University of Michigan Health Rogel Cancer Center demonstrated that the SWI/SNF complex facilitates access to enhancers that oncogenes can bind to and drive downstream gene expression in cancer. Degrading a subunit of this complex blocks the oncogenes, like cutting the puppet master's strings.
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