Early cancer diagnosis is vital for treating breast cancer - and one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, according to an article in Molecular&Cellular Proteomics - but early detection is still challenging as testing by mammography remains cumbersome, costly, and in many cases, cancer can only be detected at an advanced stage.

A team based in the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine has developed a new microfluidics-based microarray that could change how and when cancer is diagnosed.

Most breast cancers are categorized as estrogen-receptor positive, which means they are hormone sensitive and may need estrogen to grow. Patients with this type of cancer often respond favorably to aromatase inhibitors, like tamoxifen, which cause cell death by preventing estrogen from reaching the cancerous cells. Over time, the disease often becomes resistant to estrogen deprivation from the drugs, making treatment options more limited. 

New findings from the AACR Annual Meeting identified a pair of proteins that could play a crucial role in restoring treatment sensitivity to these resistant cancerous cells—possibly leading to more treatment options in the future.

Utopia is a perfect world where we can eat to our heart's content without without getting heart disease or diabetes or even cancer.  In mice, Utopia may be coming closer. Mice with an extra dose of a known anti-cancer gene called Pten lose weight even as their appetites grow. They also live longer - but not just because they aren't getting cancer.

One of the animals' youthful secrets is hyperactive brown fat, which burns energy instead of storing it. The findings add to evidence that tumor suppressors aren't designed only to protect us against cancer, the researchers say. They also point to new treatment strategies aimed to boost brown fat and fight aging.

Signals can tell cells to act cancerous, surviving, growing and reproducing out of control. And signals can also tell cells with cancerous characteristics to stop growing or to die. In breast cancer, one tricky signal called TGF-beta does both – sometimes promoting tumors and sometimes suppressing them.

A study recently published in the journal Oncogene details how tumors may flip the TGF-beta signalling switch, allowing doctors to delete the pathway entirely when it promotes tumors, and leave it intact when it’s still working to suppress them.

A study of 64,659 women, recently published in the journal Academic Radiology, found that while 1,246 of these women were at high enough breast cancer risk to recommend additional screening with MRI, only 173 of these women returned to the clinic within a year for the additional screening.

“It’s hard to tell where, exactly, is the disconnect,” says Deborah Glueck, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and associate professor of biostatistics and informatics at the Colorado School of Public Health, the paper’s senior author.

One hypothesis goes that electric toasters became popular because something had to be done with electricity. So it may go with some vaccines.  Roche has set up a co -marketing agreement with private laboratory Unilabs-IHS to support greater access to HPV testing throughout the UK. 

In early December the streets of San Diego were dressed with holiday decorations. Although the city was not blanketed in a layer of snow as seen in a storybook holiday scene, the palm-tree lined streets were covered with people wearing red and white badges, adding to the holiday colors, but providing a different kind of spirit to the downtown area. Among these people one could hear many conversations about anemia, leukemia, platelets or angiogenesis as medical doctors and researchers alike, discussed these topics.

Two recent studies are providing a foundation for a more complete understanding of distinct kidney cancer subtypes, which could pave the way for better treatments.

In a study published in Cancer Cell led by Kyle Furge, Ph.D. and Aikseng Ooi, Ph.D. of Van Andel Research Institute, they provide a more complete understanding of the biology of Type 2 papillary renal cell carcinoma (PRCC2), an aggressive type of kidney cancer with no effective treatment, which lays the foundation for the development of effective treatment strategies.