CHICAGO – At the 2017 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), immunotherapy was front and center, as it is wont to be these days.
So wrote the Australian University of Melbourne's Samuel Berkovic, telling it like it is with respect to the medical use of cannabinoids in epileptic patients. Despite spectacular anecdotes in the lay press, peer-reviewed data supporting the practice has been sorely lacking.
Keytruda (pembrolizumab, Merck & Co. Inc.) has become the first drug to be approved based solely on the presence of a molecular biomarker without regard to tumor location.
At least one of the abstracts highlighted at the press briefing of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) last week threw an involuntary highlight on the problems that can beset cancer treatment even in successful trials.
"With the advent of targeted cancer therapies, what we've found is that many of them are cardiotoxic," Saptarsi Haldar told BioWorld Today. "Pathways that are effective in cancer are toxic in the heart."
There are 64 possible three-letter combinations of the four DNA bases that are the building blocks of the genetic code, but only 20 amino acids that are the building blocks of proteins. Some amino acids can be coded for by several different three-base combinations – for example, the triplets ACA, ACC, ACG and ACT all code for the amino acid threonine. When one of those bases changes, the resulting single-nucleotide polymorphism is called synonymous (sSNP). It has been assumed that sSNPs have no effect on proteins. Now, researchers from the German University of Hamburg and the British University of Bristol have shown that a change from ACT to ACG in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) affected CFTR function.
At least one of the abstracts highlighted at the press briefing of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) on Wednesday threw an involuntary highlight on the problems that can beset cancer treatment even in successful trials.
Gram-negative bacteria are protected from many antibiotics by their outer cell membranes. Studies attempting to understand what allows compounds to rapidly cross that cell membrane have focused on known antibiotics. Now, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has screened a more chemically diverse set of compounds to identify additional characteristics of compounds that could get across the outer membrane. The results of the analysis were used to design derivatives of the gram-positive antibiotic deoxynybomycin that were effective against gram-negative bacteria as well.
The first large-scale analysis of noncoding genome regions in pancreatic cancer samples has both implicated new players in pancreatic cancer and given insights into how known culprits exert their effects.
