Cancer News and Discussions

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Every Single Patient in This Small Experimental Drug Trial Saw Their Cancer Disappear
PETER DOCKRILL
6 JUNE 2022
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-nasa-euro ... -main.html
In what appears to be a very promising breakthrough for the treatment of rectal cancer, a small drug trial conducted in the US found every patient treated in the experiment had their cancer successfully go into remission.

The medication given, called dostarlimab and sold under the brand name Jemperli, is an immunotherapy drug used in the treatment of endometrial cancer, but this was the first clinical investigation of whether it was also effective against rectal cancer tumors.

The early results reported so far suggest it is surprisingly effective, with the research team saying the successful cancer remission seen in every trial patient may be unprecedented for a cancer drug intervention.

"I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer," medical oncologist Luis Diaz Jr. from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), the senior author of a new paper reporting the results, told The New York Times.
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Study identifies receptor that could alleviate need for chemo, radiation pre-T cell therapy
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... -cell.html
by University of California, Los Angeles
Before a patient can undergo T cell therapy designed to target cancerous tumors, the patient's entire immune system must be destroyed with chemotherapy or radiation. The toxic side effects are well known, including nausea, extreme fatigue and hair loss.

Now a research team, led by UCLA's Anusha Kalbasi, MD, in collaboration with scientists from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, has shown that a synthetic IL-9 receptor allows those cancer-fighting T cells to do their work without the need for chemo or radiation. T cells engineered with the synthetic IL-9 receptor, designed in the laboratory of Christopher Garcia, Ph.D., at Stanford, were potent against tumors in mice, as published Wednesday in Nature.

"When T cells are signaling through the synthetic IL-9 receptor, they gain new functions that help them not only outcompete the existing immune system but also kill cancer cells more efficiently," Kalbasi said. "I have a patient right now struggling through toxic chemotherapy just to wipe out his existing immune system so T cell therapy can have a fighting chance. But with this technology you might give T cell therapy without having to wipe out the immune system beforehand."
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Researchers find that aspirin alters colorectal cancer evolution
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... ution.html
by University of California, Irvine
Cancer starts when cells start dividing uncontrollably. Scientists have known that taking aspirin can help protect against the development of colorectal cancer—cancer afflicting the colon or rectum—but the exact reason aspirin has this effect has been mostly a mystery.

In a new study published in the journal eLife, researchers at the University of California, Irvine reveal for the first time that aspirin changes the way colorectal cancer cell populations evolve over time, making them less able to survive and proliferate.

"We asked what aspirin does to the Darwinian evolution of cells," said co-author Dominik Wodarz, professor of population health and disease prevention at the UCI Program in Public Health. "Cancer arises because cells evolve from a healthy state toward a pathogenic state where the cells divide without stopping. This happens when cells acquire a number of mutations, and these mutations are selected for. We found that aspirin affects these evolutionary processes and slows them down."
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Scientists create nanoparticle that helps fight solid tumors
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... umors.html
by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
Researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine have discovered a possible new approach in treating solid tumors through the creation of a novel nanoparticle. Solid tumors are found in cancers such as breast, head and neck, and colon cancer.

In the study, Xin Ming, Ph.D., associate professor of cancer biology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and his team used a nanoparticle to deliver a small molecule called ARL67156 to promote an anti-tumor immune response in mouse models of colon, head and neck, and metastatic breast cancer, resulting in increased survival.

The study is published online in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment, but unfortunately, only about 20% of patients respond to treatment.

"Most solid tumors have a poor microenvironment that can make them unresponsive to conventional cancer therapeutics, including immunotherapy," Ming said. "But this study demonstrates that nanoparticle therapeutics are promising."
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Deep learning empowers discovery of new genetic mutation in cancer
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... ation.html
by Will Doss, Northwestern University
A machine-learning model has helped scientists discover hundreds of genetic mutations in cancer that are undetectable by current genome sequencing, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.

These findings provide new targets for cancer classification and potential therapy, according to Feng Yue, Ph.D., the Duane and Susan Burnham Professor of Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study.

"Our work identified many previously unknown fusion events in cancer genomes and also captured novel regulatory mechanism for known oncogenes," said Yue, who is also an associate professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, of Pathology and director of the Center for Cancer Genomics at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.
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TCF-1 protein plays essential role in breaking down barriers as T cells form

by Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... riers.html
The protein TCF-1 enables various parts of otherwise insulated DNA segments to intermingle in a way that is required for the development of T cells—a key element of the body's immune system—and the role this protein plays in T cell creation could shed new light on immunotherapy approaches, according to a new study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings are published today in Nature Immunology.

Mammalian DNA is folded in 3D structures that create what one can think of as different neighborhoods in the genome. These neighborhoods, formally called topologically associating domains, or TADs, are sections of DNA that are insulated from other neighborhoods in order to control the expression of different genes. Sometimes, these neighborhoods need to intermingle because a piece of DNA in one neighborhood may be required to control and develop a unique set of genes in another.

By studying the mechanics of the protein TCF-1 and how it reconfigures the genome, a research team led by Golnaz Vahedi, Ph.D., an associate professor of Genetics and a member of the Penn Institute for Immunology and Penn Epigenetics Institute, discovered that the TCF-1 protein has a unique ability to enable plasticity in cells across neighborhoods during the development of T cells.

"These domains, or insulated neighborhoods, are like stickers for social distancing," Vahedi said. "They essentially say, 'Stay away—keep a certain distance apart.' But what this protein does is to remove these stickers and say, 'You can now actually intermingle.' It disrupts the spatial distancing."

Using various basic science experiments, the researchers saw that TCF-1, along with the protein CTCF, targets boundaries of insulated neighborhoods when T cells are developing, thereby weakening the insulation and minimizing the distance between these adjacent neighborhoods that were previously blocked off. The co-binding of TCF-1 with CTCF increases interactions across neighborhoods as T cells mature, indicating that TCF-1 plays an essential role in the development and maturation of T cells, which are a central component of immunotherapies that aim to manipulate T cells as drugs to proliferate and kill cancer cells.
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Biomarkers found that could be drug targets against a deadly form of brain cancer

by Georgetown University Medical Center
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... ancer.html
Biomarkers that could be targets for novel drugs to treat glioblastoma brain tumors have been identified by investigators at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, providing hope for a cancer that is highly lethal.

Currently, the drug most often used to treat glioblastoma, temozolomide, is uniquely able to cross the blood/brain barrier to attack the tumor but resistance develops rapidly, and many patients do not survive for more than a year after diagnosis. This new finding provides early evidence that there may be a benefit in targeting specific alterations in cancer cells with newer agents once a patient's tumor becomes resistant to temozolomide.
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Pushing T cells down 'memory lane' may improve cancer therapy
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... erapy.html
by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital identified a molecular mechanism that in a preclinical study unlocked the promise of CAR T-cell therapy for treatment of solid tumors. The results were published today in the journal Nature.

"Our work extends from the basic biology of T lymphocytes to a possible application in the clinic, with an exploration of deep molecular mechanisms along the way," said co-corresponding author Doug Green, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Immunology chair. "We found that just like many of us, if you are an activated T cell, things that happen early in your life can impact your later development. We identified that an interaction between the protein c-Myc and the complex cBAF early in T-cell activation influences cell fate trajectory."

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are a type of immunotherapy that modifies a patient's immune cells to target cancer cells. This type of therapy has had remarkable success in treating children and adults with leukemia and lymphoma, particularly in relapsed patients. However, CAR T cells have not had the same success against solid tumors, with problems involving persistence and function.

Currently too many CAR T cells become effector cells, those that directly kill infected or cancerous cells. Too few become memory cells that persist and create more T cells over the long term. The researchers believed that if they created more memory cells, they could improve CAR T-cell therapy.
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An app to help doctors help patients with leukemia
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... kemia.html
by University of Copenhagen

Within five years, 25% of patients suffering from chronic Lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) will develop a serious infection or need early treatment for CL: 10% of these risk dying within a month.

In order to help these patients, doctors would like to be able to identify those at risk of developing infections immediately after they have been diagnosed with CLL.

A team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Rigshospitalet has made this their mission, and this has led to the development of an app.

Chief physician and Clinical Associate Professor Carsten Niemann, who is part of the team responsible for the new study, explains:

"It has improved our chances of identifying those patients, once diagnosed, who will require treatment and close follow-up. We have developed an app that allows doctors to enter previous and current blood test results and thus receive data on the individual patient's risk of a severe course of illness," says Carsen Niemann from the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen and the Department of Haematology at Rigshospitalet, Denmark's leading hospital.
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Combination treatment may improve quality of life in kidney cancer
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06- ... idney.html
by Melissa Rohman, Northwestern University
Patients with advanced kidney cancer who received a new combination treatment reported health-related quality of life outcomes that were either similar or improved, compared to patients who received standard first-line therapy, according to a study published in The Lancet Oncology.

The findings underscore the potential for the new treatment combination in improving patients' course of treatment and extending survival, said David Cella, Ph.D., the Ralph Seal Paffenbarger Professor and chair of the Department of Medical Social Sciences, and senior author of the study.

"Effective treatment options have never been better for this disease and yet more progress is needed. Patients' reports of how they are feeling and functioning is certainly meaningful to them, and also can help clinicians when guiding continued quality care," said Cella, who is also director of the Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes, part of the Institute for Public Health and Medicine (IPHAM), and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

Advanced kidney cancer occurs when cancer cells inhibit the inner lining of kidney tubules, which help filter and clean the blood. Over the last 20 years, treatments for the disease have improved, transitioning from biologic response-modifying drugs to more targeted therapies such as tyrosine kinase inhibitors and mTOR inhibitors.
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