Molecular 'portraits' of tumors match patients with trials in everyday clinical practice
Researchers in France are taking advantage of the progress in genetic and molecular profiling to analyse the make-up of individual cancer patients' tumours and, using this information, assign them to particular treatments and phase I clinical trials - an approach that could become part of everyday clinical practice. In research presented at the 24th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Dublin, Ireland, Dr Christophe Massard, a medical oncologist and senior consultant in the early drug development unit at the Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France, describes how he and his colleagues have successfully incorporated "molecular triaging" into their phase I clinical trial unit, with results of patients' molecular analyses being made available within three weeks of a sample being taken.
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Breast cancer drug could halt other tumors
The drug, geldanamycin, is well known for attacking a protein associated with the spread of breast cancer. However, a laboratory-based study found it also degraded a different protein that triggers blood vessel growth. Stopping unwanted blood vessel growth is a key challenge in the battle against cancer, according to Dr Sreenivasan Ponnambalam, reader in human disease biology in the University of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences.
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Researchers discover immune pathway
Researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, have now discovered an important mechanism behind one of our most fundamental lines of immune function. The discovery has been published in the esteemed scientific journal, The Journal of Immunology, where it has been highlighted as a top story. In collaboration with colleagues from USA and Turkey, they have discovered exactly which enzymes collaborate in the first line of the immune defence. Thus, they answer a central question about the so-called complement system, which has been a focal point of the scientific field for the past decade: which enzyme does what?
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The cost of prescription drugs - a comparison of 2 countries
In the United States, the cost paid for statins (drugs to lower cholesterol) in people under the age of 65 who have private insurance continues to exceed comparable costs paid by the government in the United Kingdom (U.K.) by more than three fold. These results from Boston University's Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, are a follow up of an ongoing comparison of prescription drug costs between the U.S. and U.K. The initial results reported on relative drug costs in 2005. The current updated results for 2009 appear this week in the journal Pharmacotherapy.
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New developments reveal a molecule with a promising function in terms of cancer treatment
One of the current challenges in terms of cancer treatment is how it can be best adapted to patients: today the emphasis is on personalised treatment (factoring in genetic and metabolic profiles). In response to this growing need for personalisation, there is an increasing demand for fundamental research to develop adapted future treatments. Researchers from Inserm and CNRS from the Institute for genetics and molecular and cellular biology (IGBMC) and from the Research Institute at the Strasbourg school of biotechnology (Irebs) have focussed their efforts on PARG, currently thought to be a promising new therapeutic target in the treatment of cancer.
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Protein's eye view gives clear insights into the causes of biological activity
Cresset, innovative provider of software and services, announces the release of torchV10, a complete desktop molecular design and 3D SAR tool for medicinal chemists. torchV10 uses molecular fields to show the binding patterns of your compounds. This protein's eye view gives clear insights into the causes of biological activity. Working with torchV10, medicinal chemists can see how to optimize the shape and electrostatic properties of their series, and rapidly identify the best next molecule to synthesize.
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Finnish researchers' discover new blood-vessel-generating cell with therapeutic potential
Researchers at the University of Helsinki, Finland, believe they have discovered stem cells that play a decisive role in new blood vessel growth. If researchers learn to isolate and efficiently produce these stem cells found in blood vessel walls, the cells offer new opportunities in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and many other diseases. The study will be published in the PLOS Biology journal on 16 October 2012.
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