George Sledge, outgoing president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), has a rather catchy way of summarizing where cancer treatment needs to be going.
Researchers reported this week that in mice, they have been able to induce adult heart stem cells to proliferate and repair damage by "priming" them with the peptide Tbeta-4.
CHICAGO – Much has been made of the ways that industry could improve drug discovery. And the FDA, of course, is everybody's favorite whipping boy for the low rate of drug discovery, be it in cancer or anything else.
CHICAGO – Much-anticipated full results for two new melanoma drugs were reported at the 47th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and published online in The New England Journal of Medicine, on Sunday: the BRIM3 trial of Vemurafenib (PLX4032/RG7204, Plexxikon Inc./Roche AG) and the 024 study on Yervoy (Ipilimumab, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.)
CHICAGO – The 47th annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology began with something of an ode to targeted therapy. In data presented in a session on personalized medicine, researchers from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center showed that when end-stage cancer patients had their tumors analyzed and received targeted therapies that matched their mutations, the response rate more than quintupled and survival increased by several months.
CHICAGO ‑ As a scientist by training, I tend to look with unbridled optimism at technological advances. So it was striking to me to see how those that are expected to do something useful with such advances sometimes have a more nuanced take on them. Genomic technologies have led to a “tsunami of information,” outgoing ASCO president George Sledge told the audience in his plenary lecture. And it is a tsunami that the current clinical trials system, let alone the practicing oncologist, is in many ways unprepared for. Sledge is no Luddite. In fact, he spent much of his talk...
High hopes are riding on biomarkers. By stratifying patient populations and bringing the right drug to the right patient at the right time, the idea goes, biomarkers will be critical to the success of personalized medicine. As a result, there is a veritable parade of biomarkers in the scientific literature.
By using computational methods to design proteins that can attach to carbon nanotubes, researchers have been able to encase nanotubes in proteins which were capable of binding gold nanoparticles at regular intervals, creating a nanostructure with multiple layers and what they termed "a richly textured molecular surface."
Scientists have identified a new pathway that controls key metabolic steps in the control of the liver's fat content, which in turn is tightly linked to blood sugar control. The pathway could be useful as a target for antidiabetic agents. They reported their findings in the May 25, 2011, issue of Nature.
