Oncology & Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is a severe illness and major challenge in cancer medicine since it is difficult to diagnose, while potential therapies are scarce. A new international cooperation study indicates that in the future pancreatic cancer may be detected at an early stage from gut microbes. Gut microbes may also offer solutions for therapy development.

Scientists have discovered tumors can tap a nontraditional pathway to acquire lipoproteins—molecules that transport fat in blood—which enriches cancer cells with an antioxidant shield to survive stress, according to new research from Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) published in Nature.

A new target for potential treatments for blast phase myeloproliferative neoplasm (BP-MPN), one of the most aggressive forms of leukemia, has been identified by a research team at the University of Oxford.

Tumor cells have higher metabolic activity compared to healthy tissue and consequently consume a lot of glucose. Positron Emission Tomography (PET)—the current gold standard diagnostic technique—exploits this property.

A newly developed molecular imaging technique can identify multiple subtypes of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), enabling earlier and more accurate detection of this aggressive disease, according a paper published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine titled “Targeting Extra Domain A of Fibronectin to Improve Noninvasive Detection of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer.”

Imagine diagnosing cancer not with a supercomputer but on an ordinary laptop instead. Sounds like science fiction? Thanks to a revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by Professor Kenji Suzuki and his research team from Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo), this far-fetched scenario is now a reality.

For patients with resectable gastric or gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma, durvalumab plus fluorouracil, leucovorin, oxaliplatin, and docetaxel (FLOT) yields better event-free survival outcomes than FLOT alone, according to a study published online June 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research was published to coincide with the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, held from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago.

Envision this possible future clinical scenario: a breast cancer patient and her physicians are deciding on the best possible treatment. Their decision is informed by a comprehensive molecular profile of the patient’s cancer samples that predicts the most likely response of the cancer to treatment.

Colorectal cancer screening programs are currently underutilized in Germany. This also applies to testing for blood in the stool. The immunological stool tests can detect tiny amounts of blood in the stool. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have investigated whether smartphone-based testing could be a meaningful alternative or supplement to traditional laboratory tests. The paper is published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Recent results from the NRG-NSABP B-51/RTOG 1304 clinical study showed that the addition of regional nodal irradiation (RNI) does not decrease the rates of invasive breast cancer recurrence in patients whose positive axillary nodes at presentation convert to negative following neoadjuvant chemotherapy. These results were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.