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/