Tag: Chemotherapy

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Brain Hijackers: How cancer manipulates the brain to help it grow

by Hannah Farnsworthfigures with Xiaomeng Han Most people know someone in their life who has been impacted by cancer, and a staggering 40% of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetimes. Despite the prevalence of cancer in the general population, there are many types of cancer that still lack effective treatments. One such form of cancer is a type of brain tumor called … Continue reading Brain Hijackers: How cancer manipulates the brain to help it grow

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Gertrude Elion: Forging the path towards a cure for cancer

Jasmin Joseph-Chazan is a second-year PhD student in the Immunology department at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter as @chazanjasmin. Isabella Fraschilla is a Ph.D. student in the Immunology Program at Harvard Medical School. She is studying how immune cells regulate commensal gut bacteria. Cover image by Arek Socha from Pixabay. This biography is part of our “Picture a Scientist” initiative. To learn … Continue reading Gertrude Elion: Forging the path towards a cure for cancer

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Gertrude Elion: Forging the path towards a cure for cancer

by Isabella Fraschilla Despite never receiving a PhD, Gertrude Elion was awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine. She shared this prize with Sir James Black and her mentor George Hitchings for revolutionizing pharmacology by rejecting the standard trial-and-error approach for rational drug design. Their critical work in understanding drug metabolism and physiological processes resulted in the rare Nobel Prize awarded to employees of a … Continue reading Gertrude Elion: Forging the path towards a cure for cancer

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Nanomaterials as cancer treatment: overcoming drug resistance in chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a common cancer treatment, using drugs to destroy cancer cells. However, cancer cells can develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs by developing “efflux pumps”, pumps in the cell membrane that work to actively expel the chemotherapy drugs from the tumor cells. Shana Kelley and her team in University of Toronto developed nanomaterials that can deliver drugs into cancer cells and suppress their drug resistance. … Continue reading Nanomaterials as cancer treatment: overcoming drug resistance in chemotherapy

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A new medical implant might greatly reduce the risk of chemotherapy treatment

Chemotherapy is a common and dangerous cancer treatment due to the negative effects on everything that is not a tumor cell. Researchers from Columbia University have invented a soft medical implant capable of administering drugs from inside the body. The ability to place this device close to the target area allows for a significant (90%) reduction of the drug dosage to be used. Similarly, avoiding body-wide administration of the drug can greatly reduce the damage inflicted by normal chemotherapy dosages. Continue reading A new medical implant might greatly reduce the risk of chemotherapy treatment

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FDA suspends (and promptly restarts) clinical trial for new cancer therapy

Bringing a new medical therapy to market is rarely a straightforward task, as a biotech company called Juno Therapeutics learned firsthand.  Juno specializes in CAR-T therapy, which uses genetic engineering to teach a patient’s own immune system to destroy cancer cells. Unfortunately, 3 of the 129 patients who had received this treatment in a clinical trial recently died from excessive brain swelling, prompting the FDA to … Continue reading FDA suspends (and promptly restarts) clinical trial for new cancer therapy

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Brain tricks to make food taste sweeter: How to transform taste perception and why it matters

by Jessleen K. Kanwal figures by Brad Wierbowski Imagine for a moment that you are unable to taste or smell anything.  For many patients undergoing chemotherapy, this is an everyday reality of their daily fight against cancer.  Chemotherapy kills fast-growing cells in the body in an effort to eradicate tumors.  Taste receptor cells located on our tongue are also fast-growing, regenerating every 2 weeks.  Thus, … Continue reading Brain tricks to make food taste sweeter: How to transform taste perception and why it matters

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New Directions for Cancer Therapy: Targeted Medicine

by Zachary Hauseman figures by Michael Gerhardt The cure for cancer: something we all hear about but never seems to arrive. It’s easy to get frustrated about decades and decades of research while thousands of people still succumb to the disease daily [1]. However, recent cancer treatments offer exciting potential for the field of cancer therapeutics in the future. Cancer is a complicated illness that … Continue reading New Directions for Cancer Therapy: Targeted Medicine

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EBC-46, a novel PKC inhibitor shows pre-clinical potential
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New cancer drug promising, but has a long way to go

A recent article published in Medical Express last week touts the impressive findings of a pre-clinical study on the experimental drug EBC-46 (pictured above). In the article, they claim that EBC-46 is able to effectively destroy tumors by destroying the blood vessels that supply it with oxygen and nutrients. It is important, however, to remember that the work they are reporting on is very preliminary … Continue reading New cancer drug promising, but has a long way to go

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