Cancer News and Discussions

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Study develops new way of identifying cancer cells
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-cancer-cells.html
by Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
A new method of separating cancer cells from non-cancer cells has been developed by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, in a boost for those working to better understand cancer biology using single-cell mRNA sequencing.

The study, published today in Communications Biology, improves on existing methods to identify which cells in a sample are cancerous and provides crucial data on the microenvironment of tumors. The software is openly available for researchers around the world to apply to their own data, advancing the effectiveness of single-cell sequencing to understand cancer.

Single cell mRNA analysis of cancer cells is one of the leading edge techniques being used to better understand cancer biology. The data generated can be used to try to disrupt cancers with drugs or work out how cancers arise in the first place.

A fundamental step in this process is separating cancer and non-cancer cells, but this isn't always an easy task. As well as the many types of cancer, there will also be molecular differences between cancer cells of the same type within a single tumor.

Currently, the best method of doing this is to measure the average gene expression of cells in the sample, with higher or lower expression used to distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells. But this method can lead to false conclusions.

In this new study, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute performed whole genome sequencing and single-cell mRNA sequencing on samples collected by Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).
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Putting liquid biopsies on solid ground: Cancer diagnosis from a milliliter of blood
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ancer.html
by Weizmann Institute of Science
Blood tests—simple, noninvasive and economically feasible—promise to become the next major milestone in cancer diagnosis. However, most of these tests, dubbed liquid biopsies, are currently not reliable enough for widespread use. A new, multiparameter approach developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science may lead to a blood test that will diagnose cancer with unprecedented accuracy. This research is being published today in Nature Biotechnology.

"Many of the conventional methods clinically available today to detect and diagnose cancer are invasive and unpleasant," explains Dr. Efrat Shema of Weizmann's Immunology and Regenerative Biology Department, who headed the research team. Obtaining biopsy samples via needle, endoscopy or surgery can be painful and sometimes risky, and imaging methods, such as MRI or PET scans, require costly, bulky equipment that is not universally available. Effective blood tests for cancer screening or diagnosis could provide an attractive alternative.

"Eliminating the discomfort means that people would be less likely to avoid getting tested—and more likely to have their cancers detected earlier," says Vadim Fedyuk, who led the study together with fellow graduate student Nir Erez.

The idea for diagnosing cancer using liquid biopsies arose from the fact that blood contains free-floating DNA and proteins shed by dead blood cells in healthy people—and in cancer patients, by dead tumor cells as well. "Some of the byproducts of cell destruction, including cancer DNA and proteins, are dumped into the bloodstream, and we know how to collect and analyze them," Shema says.
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Immune cells engineered to battle cancer can be turned 'on' or 'off'
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ancer.html
by Boston University

The billions of immune cells that help protect us from diseases do amazing things, but sometimes they need a little boost. For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out ways to engineer living immune cells to better combat aggressive diseases, like cancer.

One big, relatively recent advancement in the fight against cancer is CAR T-cell therapy, a treatment that involves modifying immune cells called T cells, microscopic powerhouses that take on infections. Scientists have figured out a way to remove T cells from a person's blood, insert a special kind of gene called a receptor, which binds to cancer cells, and transfer the engineered T cells back to the patient. This type of receptor—a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR—is tailored to match the specific cancer being targeted and has been found to be effective for treating certain types of cancer, especially leukemia. Once CAR-T cells reenter the bloodstream, they start to replicate and begin their fight.

"It is very exciting technology," says Wilson Wong, a Boston University College of Engineering associate professor of biomedical engineering, who has been studying CAR-T cells for over 10 years. But there are problems with safety, he says, that can make the therapy extremely risky.

At times, CAR-T cells overstimulate the immune system, which triggers the release of a substance called cytokine. This can cause a potentially fatal inflammatory condition known as cytokine release syndrome. Other serious complications can include neurological difficulties, or other organs in the body being mistakenly targeted by the immune cells.

To make this groundbreaking therapy less risky for patients, Wong and a team of researchers are working to create a safety switch built into the CAR-T cell design. In a new paper in Cancer Cell, the researchers reveal a new type of CAR-T cell that can be turned on or off, making it possible to stop cells from activating before severe side effects occur.
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Platinum-based chemotherapy distribution within a tumor may predict ovarian cancer treatment resistance
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... ancer.html
by Nagoya University
A team of researchers from Japan has discovered that the distribution of platinum within a tumor following platinum-based chemotherapy treatment of ovarian cancer may predict whether the tumor will be resistant to further treatment. The research could offer ways to manage treatment for women whose tumors may be resistant to further platinum-based chemotherapy.

One of the biggest problems with treating ovarian cancer is completely removing the cancer surgically. To facilitate easier surgical removal, patients are given platinum-based chemotherapy drugs early in treatment to shrink the tumor. These drugs introduce platinum into the DNA of the cancer cells making up the tumor, which makes the DNA difficult to read and causes the cells to die.

However, if the tumor is not completely removed, it takes advantage of the body's weakened immunity and comes back, often growing faster than before.

Because the tumor has experienced the treatment before, it develops increased resistance to it, in the same manner that bacteria can become resistant to antibiotics. Repeated exposure leads to 80% of women developing ovarian cancer tumors that are resistant to further treatment. Therefore, a technique that would allow doctors to tell if the patient will develop resistance to these commonly used drugs would make this process a lot more effective.
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Vaping may ‘wake up’ cancer cells and trigger wave of disease in a decade
6 hours ago

Vaping could cause a new wave of cancer in ten years’ time, according to scientists.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute (FCI) say while vaping is safer than smoking cigarettes, the long-term health risks are unclear.

Around 3.6 million people in Britain smoke e-cigarettes and are commonly used by ex-smokers to help them quit.

Professor Charles Swanton, clinical scientist at the FCI and chief clinician at Cancer Research UK, says vaping poses a potential threat to people’s health.

“I don’t think we can say vaping is necessarily a safe option to quit smoking. It may be safer but that doesn’t mean it’s safe,” he said.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-styl ... 65228.html
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HSD3B1 gene research shows an association between genotype and endometrial cancer
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... trial.html
by Cleveland Clinic

The HSD3B1 gene could hold clues for predicting and treating endometrial cancer, according to a novel finding from the Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute.

Researchers found a certain HSD3B1 genotype was more common in women with type 2 endometrial cancer, according to the results published in JNCI Cancer Spectrum. Those patients show lower survival rates than those diagnosed with type 1 endometrial cancer, likely driven by the fact that type 2 patient cells are less hormone-dependent.

The results are the latest step in untangling the role HSD3B1's genotype plays in hormone-driven cancers, with previous research revealing associations with breast and prostate cancer. This body of work was in part led by Cleveland Clinic researchers and physician-scientists, and continues today with translational research and clinical trials.
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Researchers identify immune cell that helps kill bladder cancer tumors
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... umors.html
by The Mount Sinai Hospital
Mount Sinai researchers have made two important discoveries about the mechanism by which bladder cancer cells foil attacks from the immune system. The research, published in Cancer Cell in September, could lead to a new therapeutic option for patients with these types of tumors.

Advanced bladder cancer is aggressive and patients generally have poor prognoses. Several immune checkpoint inhibitors have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for bladder cancer, but they only sustain good responses in about 20 percent of patients.

When people get cancer, a type of immune cell called a "natural killer cell" swings into action to try to kill off the tumor cells. However, the tumor cells are often able to foil the attacks from the natural killer cells. The Mount Sinai researchers reported that they had found a subset of CD8 T cells that adapts to tumor evasion strategies by appropriating innate-like properties traditionally ascribed to natural killer cells, offering a strategy to reduce the tumor cells' ability to fight them off.

To create additional killer cells, the researchers showed that they could induce CD8+ T cells to express a molecule known as NKG2A on their surface, allowing them to behave more like natural killer cells. This study showed that NKG2A is associated with improved survival and with responsiveness to a cancer-fighting immunotherapy known as PD-L1 checkpoint blockade.
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Drug turns cancer gene into 'eat me' flag for immune system
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... mmune.html
by Robin Marks, University of California, San Francisco
Tumor cells are notoriously good at evading the human immune system; they put up physical walls, wear disguises and handcuff the immune system with molecular tricks. Now, UC San Francisco researchers have developed a drug that overcomes some of these barriers, marking cancer cells for destruction by the immune system.

The new therapy, described in Cancer Cell, pulls a mutated version of the protein KRAS to the surface of cancer cells, where the drug-KRAS complex acts as an "eat me" flag. Then, an immunotherapy can coax the immune system to effectively eliminate all cells bearing this flag.

"The immune system already has the potential to recognize mutated KRAS, but it usually can't find it very well. When we put this marker on the protein, it becomes much easier for the immune system," said UCSF chemist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Kevan Shokat, Ph.D., who also helped lead the new work.

KRAS mutations are found in about one quarter of all tumors, making them one of the most common gene mutations in cancer. Mutated KRAS is also the target of sotorasib, which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given preliminary approval for use in lung cancer, and the two approaches may eventually work well in combination.
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New checkpoint gene demonstrates ability to supercharge immune cells against cancer
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... mmune.html
by University of Minnesota Medical School
University of Minnesota researchers and their collaborators at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) investigated the role of a new intracellular checkpoint gene in regulating T-cell function against solid tumors. Known as CISH, the team published results in Med that show the checkpoint gene plays a key role in suppressing the ability of human T-cells to recognize and attack cancer cells.

When CISH is disabled, T-cells more effectively recognize mutated proteins produced by tumors. CISH inhibition also preserved T-cell fitness and made T-cells more responsive to existing checkpoint therapies, suggesting a new avenue to make breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy.

"It is a true bench-to-bedside story that is currently being deployed in patients with metastatic gastrointestinal cancer who have exhausted virtually all other treatment options," said Beau Webber, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and member of the Masonic Cancer Center. "We are applying what we found in the lab to patients seeking care for gastrointestinal cancer."
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Study of cancer immunotherapy patients reveals markers of treatment response

by Allessandra DiCorato, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-09- ... rkers.html
The treatment of blood cancers has dramatically improved in the last five years, thanks to a new class of cancer immunotherapies called CAR-T cell therapy. This therapy—which involves engineering a patient's own T cells in the lab to kill cancer cells and then infusing them back into the patient—cures about 40% of people with otherwise incurable lymphoma. But others relapse or don't respond to the treatment at all.

To learn about the molecular mechanisms underlying such different responses, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Massachusetts General Hospital, studied blood samples of patients who received CAR-T therapy. They found molecular markers that indicate how a patient responded to the treatment, and also identified specific types of immune cells that likely contribute to relapse.

The authors say their study, which appears today in Nature Medicine and is part of a Broad and IBM collaboration investigating resistance to cancer treatment, could one day help doctors select the best treatment for their patients and help scientists optimize these therapies to improve response rates.

"Gaining understanding of the T cell phenotypes of CAR-T cells before and after infusion provides us with insight into the basis for why patients do or do not respond to this potentially life-saving therapy," said Catherine Wu, co-senior author on the study and an institute member at Broad, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber, and staff physician at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's Hospital.
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