CHICAGO – With five-year survival rates of 15 percent, lung cancer treatment is not, overall, one of oncology's poster children. Partly, that's due to the sheer genomic complexity of the disease. And the disease, like its most frequent cause, smoking, comes with social stigma.
CHICAGO – Roche AG subsidiary Genentech Inc. and partner ImmunoGen Inc. had what looks to be another winner at Sunday's plenary session of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.
CHICAGO – Given the fact that President Obama was in Chicago for his own purposes on Friday and Saturday, leading to posted warnings about possible travel delays in the conference shuttles, the first astounding bit of news out of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting may have been that all speakers made it to the opening press briefing.
Two groups reported new advances this week in one area of bio-nanotechnology, namely the quest to design protein units that can self-assemble into more complex structures.
Scientists have identified a new characteristic that could be used to identify progenitor cells that are particularly likely to differentiate into bone, cartilage and fat, respectively. Instead of the usual cell surface markers, they measured the mechanical characteristics of one type of stem cell, the mesenchymal stem cell, and were able to predict whether a given cell was more likely to differentiate into bone, cartilage or fat.
The statistic showing that more than one-third of currently marketed drugs target G-protein coupled receptors is often quoted as evidence that those receptors make good drug targets. And they do. But such convergence is also evidence that although drug discovery is a vast endeavor, in some ways it could be described as a mile wide and an inch deep.
Researchers at the New York University School of Medicine have identified a treatment that they hope will extend the life expectancy of implants. In animal experiments, treatment with agonists of the adenosine 2A receptor prevented the inflammation and subsequent bone loss that is one of the leading causes of prosthesis loosening and implant failure.
By sequencing extremely large numbers of people, two studies published last week add to the growing realization that the genetic component of common diseases comes in the form of many rare genetic variants, rather than a few common ones.
Having the ApoE4 gene variant is one of the strongest risk factors for developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease. Now, scientists have found out why. ApoE4 is less able to control production of the inflammatory cytokine cyclophilin A than other variants of the ApoE gene, and high levels of cyclophilin A set off inflammatory processes that ultimately damage the blood-brain barrier and the brain vasculature.
