Thread: Cancer sucks

Scientists make potential breast cancer breakthrough after preserving tissue in gel

Scientists say they have a made a potentially “gamechanging” breakthrough in breast cancer research after discovering how to preserve breast tissue outside the body for at least a week.

The study, which was funded by the Prevent Breast Cancer charity, found tissue could be preserved in a special gel solution, which will help scientists identify the most effective drug treatments for patients.

Experts found the preserved breast tissue maintained its structure, cell types and ability to respond to a series of drugs in the same way as normal breast tissue.

Published in the Journal of Mammary Gland Biology and Neoplasia, the research could bolster the development of new drugs to treat and prevent breast cancer, without the need for testing on animals.

Dr Hannah Harrison, a research fellow at the University of Manchester, said the discovery would help scientists test the most appropriate drugs on living tissue for the treatment and prevention of breast cancer.

She said: “There are various risk-reducing options for women at high risk of developing breast cancer – for example, those with a significant family history or who have mutations in the BRCA [breast cancer] genes.

“However, not all drugs work for all women. This new approach means that we can start to determine which drugs will work for which women by measuring their impact on living tissue.

“Ultimately, this means that women can take the most effective drug for their particular genetic makeup.”

Harrison and her team managed to keep breast tissue viable outside the body for relatively long periods. “By testing different hydrogel formulas we were able to find a solution that preserves human breast tissue for at least a week – and often even longer,” she said.

“This is a real gamechanger for breast cancer research in many ways. We can better test drugs for both the prevention and treatment of cancer, and can examine how factors like breast density – which we know is a risk factor for breast cancer – react to particular hormones or chemicals to see if this has an impact on cancer development.”

Scientists used the gel solution VitroGel to preserve the tissue.

In their work, they said the identification of new drugs had been “hampered by a lack of good pre-clinical models”.

What has been available until now cannot “fully recapitulate the complexities of the human tissue, lacking human extracellular matrix, stroma, and immune cells, all of which are known to influence therapy response”, they said.

Lester Barr, a consultant breast surgeon and founder of Prevent Breast Cancer, said: “Breast cancer mortality is decreasing in the UK thanks to improved screening and treatment options, but incidences continue to rise and breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK.

“It’s therefore really important that we develop new prevention and risk-reduction options for women, especially for those with a high risk due to their family history or genetics.

“This breakthrough means that researchers will be able to test new drugs in the lab with far greater accuracy, which should mean fewer drugs failing at clinical trials and ultimately better results for women affected by this terrible disease.

“It’s a hugely exciting development in animal-free research which puts us in a really strong place to find new drugs to prevent breast cancer.”

On average, almost 56,000 women a year in UK are diagnosed with breast cancer, according to figures from Cancer Research UK.

Globally, breast cancer is the second most common form of cancer accounting for 11.6% of newly diagnosed cancer cases, behind lung cancer which accounts for 12.4% of new cases, according to the World Health Organization.

But survival rates for breast cancer have improved significantly. Women diagnosed with early breast cancer are 66% less likely to die from the disease than they were 20 years ago, according to research from the University of Oxford.

Figures from Cancer UK show that 76% of breast cancer patients survive for 10 years or more.

Originally Posted by taxexile

There should be a teak door forum for those who have had or have cancer. i have had cancer twice. different cancers. i am 13 years cancer free from my first cancer, and 3 years cancer free from my second cancer.

having cancer focuses the mind and puts many of lifes conundrums into a very clear perspective. receiving an all clear after a scan or blood test after a period of "scanxiety" is an indescribable and joyous high.

Baarak allahu feek.

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

Baarak allahu feek.

Meaning "'May Allah bless you""

^
thanks for the translation.

i thought it was the pikey tricolour and a silly mick aphorism.

What an ingeniously terse style of expression.

Originally Posted by taxexile

^
thanks for the translation.

i thought it was the pikey tricolour and a silly mick aphorism.

I was also seizing the opportunity to remind you Ireland recognised Palestine t’other day.

It's been a good week so far, Brexitory slime heading down the sewer, finally, and the world is witnessing the Zionist scum for what they are, nazi, ethnic-cleansing, genocidal murderers.

Originally Posted by Seekingasylum

I was also seizing the opportunity to remind you Ireland recognised Palestine t’other day.

It's been a good week so far, Brexitory slime heading down the sewer, finally, and the world is witnessing the Zionist scum for what they are, nazi, ethnic-cleansing, genocidal murderers.

They might as well recognise East Anglia, that's never going to be a country either

sheik bin al sylaam

I was also seizing the opportunity to remind you Ireland recognised Palestine t’other day.

No surprise there. they will be taking in thousands of wailing refugees then, it was the egyptian prime minister mostafa madbouly, quoted way back in 2018 shortly after he took office, when egypt and the saudis in a rare show of middle eastern pragmaticism refused to take any palestinian refugees, said “we put out our trash, we don’t take it in like the west does”

but the pikeys, those olympic gold medallist litterers, spoilers and flytippers, those titans of trash, those masters of muck, will no doubt welcome them with open arms and mosques.

stupid fuckers.

The ICJ has condemned Chaimi too.

As I said, those Israeli fuckers are finally being seen for what they are. No surprise their shitty little country has over a million Russian scumbags in occupation.

Fuck ‘em.

Ancient skull shows Egyptians tried to remove cancer 4,500 years ago

“If we understand how cancer evolves, we may understand about ourselves,” archaeologist Edgard Camarós said.

Edgard Camarós and his team were looking at a screen connected to a powerful camera aimed at an Egyptian skull from about 4,500 years ago. What they saw changed the previously understood timeline of when humans may have tried to treat cancer.

The image on the screen was definitive, he said — “It was clear that we were looking at a milestone in the history of medicine” — but nobody spoke for a few seconds.

“That was one of those eureka moments,” he told The Washington Post.

Camarós, a professor of archaeology at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and his team say they found proof that moves forward our understanding of when humans tried to treat cancer by 1,000 years. He and his team published a report Wednesday in the Frontiers in Medicine journal, detailing how they found markings indicating that ancient scientists were trying to remove cancer from a skull.

Any multicellular life form is at risk of cancer, Camarós said. Even the dinosaurs were prone to cancer.

“If we understand how cancer evolves, we may understand about ourselves,” he said. And if researches can find out how certain cancers changed or vanished, maybe they can better tackle modern-day forms of the disease.

To Camarós, oncology isn’t just about the past 20 years of successful innovation but also about thousands of years of scientific curiosity and trying to understand the disease to improve human lives. And this skull discovery moves everything forward just a bit, he said.

“It’s like witnessing the starting point of something,” he said.

The skull, No. 236, had been in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University for years after being found in 20th-century Giza, Egypt. The skull was last studied in the 1960s, when a professor confirmed that the skull had contained cancer, which Camarós said was an advanced discovery at the time.

But technology has changed a lot in six decades.

Camarós, who said he has a passion for oncology and archaeology, instantly wanted to look at the skull in 2021 when he came upon the box that was marked with “cancer” on the outside.

“It was like a magnet for me,” he said.

He and his fellow scientists placed the skull in front of the camera in October 2021.

Camarós said the microscopic technology available in the 1960s didn’t compare with modern digital cameras that can zoom with “almost no limit.”

It would “have been absolutely impossible for us not to see the cut marks,” he said.

Camarós now wants to study the genetics of ancient cancers at the molecular level to answer questions about how the disease may have changed. A big part of that is finding other samples that contain DNA and identifying whether there was cancer present.

“If there is any other case in the future, it will come out because of the technology,” he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/scien...-cancer-study/

British man tests first personalised melanoma vaccine

First ‘personalised’ melanoma skin cancer vaccine trial under way in UK

An important trial of the world's first "personalised" mRNA vaccine against the deadliest form of skin cancer - melanoma - is now under way in the UK.

Steve Young, 52, from Stevenage, Herts, who had a melanoma growth cut out of his scalp last August, is one of the first patients to try the shot.

It is designed to help his immune system recognise and wipe out any remaining cancerous cells.

And hopefully, that means his cancer will not return.

The jab, mRNA-4157 (V940), uses the same technology as current Covid vaccines and is being tested in final-stage Phase III trials.

University College London Hospitals (UCLH) doctors are giving it alongside another drug, pembrolizumab or Keytruda, that also helps the immune system kill cancer cells.

Genetic signature

The combined treatment, made by Moderna and Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD), is not yet available routinely on the NHS, outside of clinical trials.

Experts in some other countries, including Australia, are also trying it on patients, to gather more evidence and see whether it should be rolled out more widely.

The vaccine is personalised - meaning the make-up of it is changed to suit the individual patient.

It is created to match the unique genetic signature of the patient's own tumour and works by instructing the body to make proteins or antibodies that attack markers or antigens found only on those cancer cells.

'Custom built'

UCLH investigator Dr Heather Shaw said the jab had the potential to cure people with melanoma and was being tested on other cancers - lung, bladder and kidney tumours.

"This is one of the most exciting things we've seen in a really long time," she said.

"It is absolutely custom built for the patient - you couldn't give this to the next patient in the line because you wouldn't expect it to work.

"It's truly personalised.

"These things are hugely technical and finely generated for the patient."

'Really excited'

The UK part of the international trial aims to recruit at least 60-70 patients across eight centres, including in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Leeds.

The patients on trial must have had their high-risk melanoma surgically removed in the last 12 weeks to ensure the best result. Some of them will get a dummy or placebo shot rather than the vaccine. None of them know which they are receiving though.

Mr Young is having his treatment in London.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, he said: "[The trial] gave me a chance to feel like I was actually doing something to fight a potential unseen enemy.

"Scans showed I was radiologically clear, obviously there is still the chance I had cancer cells floating around undetected.

"So rather than just sit there and wait and hope it was never going to come back, I actually had this chance to get involved in putting on some boxing gloves and squaring up to it."

Drug that ‘melts away’ tumours hailed as ‘gamechanger’ for some bowel cancer patients

A “gamechanger” immunotherapy drug that “melts away” tumours dramatically increases the chances of curing bowel cancer and may even replace the need for surgery, doctors have said.

Pembrolizumab targets and blocks a specific protein on the surface of immune cells that then seek out and destroy cancer cells.

Giving the drug before surgery instead of chemotherapy led to a huge increase in patients being declared cancer-free, a clinical trial found. The results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the world’s largest cancer conference.

The study was led by University College London, University College London hospital, the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, St James’s University hospital in Leeds, University hospital Southampton and the University of Glasgow.

Prof Mark Saunders, a consultant clinical oncologist at the Christie, said the trial results were “really very exciting”.

“Immunotherapy prior to surgery could well become a ‘gamechanger’ for these patients with this type of cancer. Not only is the outcome better, but it saves patients from having more conventional chemotherapy, which often has more side-effects. In the future, immunotherapy may even replace the need for surgery.”

Bowel cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. There are more than 1.9m new cases and more than 900,000 deaths a year, according to the World Health Organization.

In the trial, funded by Merck Sharp and Dohme and sponsored by University College London, researchers recruited 32 patients with stage two or three bowel cancer and a certain genetic profile (MMR deficient/MSI-High bowel cancer) from five hospitals in the UK.

About 15% of patients with stage two or three bowel cancer have this particular genetic makeup.

Patients were given nine weeks of pembrolizumab, also known as Keytruda, before surgery instead of the usual treatment of chemotherapy and surgery, then monitored over time.

Results show 59% of patients had no signs of cancer after treatment with pembrolizumab, with any cancer in the remaining 41% of patients removed during surgery.

All of the patients in the trial were cancer-free after treatment. When standard chemotherapy was given to patients with this genetic profile, fewer than 5% had no signs of cancer after surgery, UCL said.

Over the next few years, the trial will also assess overall survival and relapse rates.

The approach also meant patients did not require any post-operative chemotherapy, which has side effects and is tough to endure.

Dr Kai-Keen Shiu, the trial’s chief investigator and a consultant medical oncologist at UCLH, said: “Our results indicate that pembrolizumab is a safe and highly effective treatment to improve outcomes in patients with high-risk bowel cancers, increasing the chances of curing the disease at an early stage.”

Shiu cautioned that the team would need to wait to see whether the patients in the trial remained cancer-free over a longer period of time, but said the initial indications were “extremely positive”.

“Immunotherapy can make tumours disappear before surgery. If you melt the cancer away before surgery you normally triple survival chances,” Shiu added. “If patients have a complete response to pembrolizumab it can triple your chance of survival.

“Patients also don’t need any chemotherapy after so they avoid all those side effects.”

Dr Marnix Jansen, a clinician scientist at the UCL Cancer Institute, said more work needed to be done to assess pembrolizumab before it could be considered standard treatment. “But given the quality of the outcomes in this trial I think it’s possible that we could see it in the clinic within a couple of years if subsequent trials are similarly successful.”