Health and Medicine

An innovative combination of two medical procedures-gene therapy and radiation therapy–can increase cancer cure rates by significant amounts compared to the cure rates offered by conventional radiation therapy alone, a Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) team has concluded. The researchers presented their results last month in Montreal at the annual conference of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

Known as genetic radiotherapy, the combined treatment can potentially inc

For some time doctors have been using a vitamin A derivative, retinoic acid (RA), to treat several cancers, particularly prostate cancer and leukemia, and they are now experimenting with the drug to treat breast cancer. The great drawback to RA, however, is that it requires high levels of the medication in order to turn genes “on” and “off,” often triggering devastating and potentially fatal side effects.

Now, a Cornell University biochemist has learned how to make tumor cells up to 1,000 t

Clinical trials of a new anticancer drug combination carried out by researchers at Newcastle University show that it has potential to almost double the life expectancy of sufferers of Mesothelioma – a form of lung cancer which affects around 1,700 people in the UK every year – according to a report published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Mesothelioma is a cancer of the pleura – the membranes that lines the inside of the chest and the outside of the lungs. It differs from other types

In recent years, laboratory discoveries have led to the development of new drugs designed to target and attack cancer cells, leaving healthy ones intact. One key weapon in this arsenal of new therapies is called Herceptin, a drug that is currently used to treat breast cancer and works by targeting a specific protein that controls cell growth called HER-2/neu. But despite the drug’s effectiveness, tumors shrink in only the small percentage of breast cancer patients whose cancer cells express an o

Your outlook on life not only may help you live longer, but it appears to have an impact on your quality of life. Mayo Clinic researchers say that optimists report a higher level of physical and mental functioning than their pessimist counterparts.

“The wellness of being is not just physical, but attitudinal,” said Toshihiko Maruta, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic Department of Psychiatry and Psychology in Rochester and the principal author of the study, which appears in the August issue of Mayo C

Investment from the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund (WRTSF) – the venture capital fund owned by the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York (UK) – has funded the completion of a series of significant technical milestones in the development of a new family of `immunologically-rational` adjuvants for vaccines, which are materially very different from the existing adjuvants based on aluminium salts and bacterial cell wall components.

Sheffield-based life science company Adjuvantix Ltd is