Monday, February 8, 2010

Monday news

Monday morning on my blog, I intend to post a bit of news concerning research that interests me at a professional (and personal) level.

Most of it will be concerned with the identification of novel techniques to understand metastatic behavior of various cancer. I'll write more about my own research which I'll be working on this year later today or next Monday. In the meantime, this is the face of modern medicine today:

MedWire (2/8, Grasmo) reported that research conducted by a team in Italy "shows that in women aged 35 years or older, human papilloma virus (HPV)-based screening is more effective than cytology in preventing invasive cervical cancer through earlier detection of persistent high-grade lesions." Investigators reached that conclusion after randomizing study participants to "conventional cytology only or to HPV testing plus liquid-based cytology (first phase) or HPV testing alone (second phase)."

MedWire (2/8, Dean) reports, "Gene expression profiling has identified fibronectin 1 and chemokine ligand (CXCL)9 as candidate biomarkers for breast cancer screening," According to the French paper in the British Journal of Cancer, the proteins were initially "identified as candidate biomarkers for blood-based screening" because "they both had more than two-fold increased expression in the cancer compared with the benign lesion, were proteins that are released in the extracellular medium and stable in serum, and had a commercially available and accurate enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay."

MedWire (2/5, Guy) reported that, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "the loss of a single nucleotide polymorphism located in the gene encoding the disabled homolog 2 interacting protein (DAB2IP) in prostate cancer cells may be responsible for cancer progression to other organs." In other words, "removing DAB2IP from human prostate carcinoma cells initiates epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition which is a characteristic of metastatic cancer." Thus, researchers at the University of Texas concluded, "DAB2IP in these cancer cells can be a valuable prognostic biomarker for risk of the aggressiveness of certain prostate cancers."

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