Novel hydrogel carriers for anti-cancer drugs offer new hope for cancer treatment

Hydrogels are often used as drug delivery systems, but to be effective carriers for anti-cancer drugs, they need to be responsive to varied stimuli in the tumor microenvironment. Now, scientists have developed novel hydrogels to effectively deliver drugs to tumor sites in response to temperature and pH changes in the tumor microenvironment. These multi-stimuli-responsive hydrogels can eliminate remnant cancer cells following tumor excision through controlled drug release, offering hope for effective cancer treatment.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Bespoke neuroblastoma therapy weaponizes cell metabolism

Preclinical research shows that the combination of two existing drugs can exploit the metabolic’hunger‘ of a particularly aggressive type of neuroblastoma to kill cancer cells without inflicting too much collateral damage to healthy tissue.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Protein rewires metabolism to block cancer cell death, may allow cancer spread

One specific protein may be a master regulator for changing how cancer cells consume nutrients from their environments, preventing cell death and increasing the likelihood the cancer could spread, a study has shown.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

A clue to how some fast-growing tumors hide in plain sight

Viruses churn out genetic material in parts of the cell where it’s not supposed to be. Cancer cells do too. A new study shows that a tumor-suppressor enzyme called DAPK3 is an essential component of a multi-protein system that senses misplaced genetic material in tumor cells, and slows tumor growth by activating the fierce-sounding STING pathway.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

New strategy for fighting brain cancer

Most people relate cholesterol to heart health, but it is also a critical component in the growth and spread of brain cancer. Researchers recently discovered how cholesterol becomes dysregulated in brain cancer cells and showed that the gene responsible for it could be a target for future drugs.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Image analysis based on machine learning reliably identifies haematological malignancies

Image analysis utilizing neural networks can help identify details in tissue samples which are difficult to discern by the human eye. A study demonstrated that the technique makes it possible to accurately determine genetic mutations in the cancer cells of patients suffering from myelodysplastic syndrome, a malignant blood disorder.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Pancreatic cancer tumors use multiple mechanisms to avoid starvation: new target for treatment?

Researchers describe how pancreatic cancer cells use an alternative method to find necessary nutrients, defying current therapies, to help them grow and spread.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Cancer cells may evade chemotherapy by going dormant

Cancer cells can dodge chemotherapy by entering a state that bears similarity to certain kinds of senescence, a type of ‚active hibernation‘ that enables them to weather the stress induced by aggressive treatments aimed at destroying them, according to a new study. These findings have implications for developing new drug combinations that could block senescence and make chemotherapy more effective.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

RNA editing protein ADAR1 protects telomeres and supports proliferation in cancer cells

Scientists identified a new function of ADAR1, a protein responsible for RNA editing, discovering that the ADAR1p110 isoform regulates genome stability at chromosome ends and is required for continued proliferation of cancer cells.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

New inhibitor found to combat drug-resistant cancer cells

A new substance could improve the treatment of persistent cancers. Researchers have developed a new inhibitor that makes drug-resistant tumor cells respond again to chemotherapy. The new substance blocks a protein in the cancer cells that normally transports the cancer drugs back out of the cells.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Switching Off the „Survival Protein“ for Cancer Cells

It is called the „survival protein“ because it plays a central role in the growth of cancer cells: survivin influences two important processes in the body’s cells at the same time – cell death and cell division. Chemists and biologists at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) have now succeeded in developing a precise molecule that can bind the protein’s surface at a defined site and switch it off. „Nature Communications“ covers the topic.

Quelle: IDW Informationsdienst Wissenschaft

Retracing the history of the mutation that gave rise to cancer decades later

Researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of cancer cells in two patients, tracing the timeline of the mutation that causes the disease to a cell of origin. In a 63-year-old patient, it occurred at around age 19; in a 34-year-old patient, at around age 9.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Single cell sequencing opens new avenues for eradicating leukemia at its source

Cancer stem cells that elude conventional treatments like chemotherapy drive long-term cancer growth and relapse. These cells are difficult to isolate and study because of their low abundance and similarity to other stem cells. Researchers have created a new method that can distinguish cancer stem cells, mature cancer cells and otherwise healthy stem cells based on their genetics and gene expression. The findings open new avenues for cancer research personalised medicine.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Sulfur metabolism may have paved the way for evolution of multicellularity

When the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum runs out of food, sulfur limitation drives its development from a unicellular to a multicellular organism. Researchers now present the nutrient signaling pathways in this early eukaryote in great detail. Their results show how metabolism may have played a crucial role in the origins of multicellularity. Moreover, the findings also have therapeutic implications for more complex organisms such as humans. Targeting sulfur metabolism in cancer cells may enhance anti-tumor immunity.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Proton therapy induces biologic response to attack treatment-resistant cancers

Researchers have developed a novel proton therapy technique to more specifically target cancer cells that resist other forms of treatment. The technique is called LEAP, an acronym for ‚biologically enhanced particle therapy.‘

Quelle: Sciencedaily

It takes two to tango: When cells interact

When normal, motile cells come into contact, they typically change direction to avoid collision. But cancer cells behave quite differently. A new statistical analysis sheds light on the basis for this difference.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Ionic liquid uniformly delivers chemotherapy to tumors while destroying cancerous tissue

Vascular and interventional radiologists report the development of a new ionic liquid formulation that killed cancer cells and allowed uniform distribution of a chemotherapy drug into liver tumors and other solid tumors in the lab. This discovery could solve a problem that has long plagued drug delivery to tumors.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Stirring up Conflicts in Tumour Cells

With two commercially available inhibitors, the cell cycle of the cancer cells in the childhood tumour neuroblastoma can be disrupted at a key point causing tumour cell death.

Quelle: IDW Informationsdienst Wissenschaft

How cells recycle the machinery that drives their motility?

Research groups have discovered a new molecular mechanism that promotes cell migration. The discovery sheds light on the mechanisms that drive uncontrolled movement of cancer cells, and also revises the ‚text book view‘ of cell migration.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Injection to treat skin cancer developed

Yale researchers are developing a skin cancer treatment that involves injecting nanoparticles into the tumor, killing cancer cells with a two-pronged approach, as a potential alternative to surgery.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

A global assessment of cancer genomic alterations in epigenetic mechanisms

Muhammad A Shah, Emily L Denton, Cheryl H Arrowsmith, Mathieu Lupien and Matthieu Schapira

Abstract

Background

The notion that epigenetic mechanisms may be central to cancer initiation and progression is supported by recent next-generation sequencing efforts revealing that genes involved in chromatin-mediated signaling are recurrently mutated in cancer patients.

Results

Here, we analyze mutational and transcriptional profiles from TCGA and the ICGC across a collection 441 chromatin factors and histones. Chromatin factors essential for rapid replication are frequently overexpressed, and those that maintain genome stability frequently mutated. We identify novel mutation hotspots such as K36M in histone H3.1, and uncover a general trend in which transcriptional profiles and somatic mutations in tumor samples favor increased transcriptionally repressive histone methylation, and defective chromatin remodeling.

Conclusions

This unbiased approach confirms previously published data, uncovers novel cancer-associated aberrations targeting epigenetic mechanisms, and justifies continued monitoring of chromatin-related alterations as a class, as more cancer types and distinct cancer stages are represented in cancer genomics data repositories.

Continue reading „A global assessment of cancer genomic alterations in epigenetic mechanisms“

Mitochondria and the evolutionary roots of cancer

Cancer is a group of almost 200 diseases that involve variety of changes in cell structure, morphology, and physiology. Cancer phenotype is underlying several alterations in cellular dynamics with three most critical features, which includes self-sufficiency in growth signals and insensitivity to inhibitory signals, evasion of programmed cell death and limitless replicative potential with a potential for the invasion of other organs. Cancer disease is widespread among metazoans. Some properties of cancer cells such as uncontrolled cell proliferation, lack of apoptosis, hypoxia, fermentative metabolism and free cell motility, i.e. metastasis, resemble a prokaryotic lifestyle, which leads to the assumption of a reversal like evolution from eucariotic back to proteobacterial state. This phenotype matches the phenotype of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) that resulted from the endosymbiosis between archaebacteria and α-proteobacteria, which later became the mitochondria.

 Davila AF and Zamorano P (2013) Mitochondria and the evolutionary roots of cancer. Phys. Biol. 10 (2013) 026008, doi:10.1088/1478-3975/10/2/026008

About metabolism of a carcinoma cell

Most cancer cells utilize aerobic glycolysis irrespective of their tissue of origin. The alteration from oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis – called the Warburg effect – is an universal phenomen and has now become a diagnostic tool for cancer detection.

Warburg O, Posener K, Negelein E. (1924) Über den Stoffwechsel der Carcinomzelle. Biochem Z. 152, 309–344.

Implications of quantum metabolism and natural selection for the origin of cancer cells and tumor progression

Energy transfer in material solids is driven primarily by differences in intensive thermodynamic quantities such as pressure and temperature. The crucial observation  in quantum-theoretical models was the consideration of the heat capacity as associated with the vibrations of atoms in a crystalline solid. However, living organisms are essentially isothermal. Because of very little differences in temperature between different parts of a cell it is assumed that energy flow in living organisms is mediated by differences in the turnover time of various metabolic processes in the cell, which occur in cyclical fashion. It has been shown that the cycle time of these metabolic processes is related to the metabolic rate, that is the rate at which the organism transforms the free energy of whatever source into metabolic work, maintenance of constant temperature and structuraland functional organization of the cells. Quantum Metabolism exploits the methodology of the quantum theory of solids to provide a molecular level which derives new rules relating metabolic rate and body size.

Davies P, Lloyd A, Demetrius LA, Tuszynski, JA (2012) Implications of quantum metabolism and natural selection for the origin of cancer cells and tumor progression. Citation: AIP Advances 2, 011101 (2012); doi: 10.1063/1.3697850

Einstein A (1920), Schallausbreitung in teilweise dissozieirten Gasen

Einstein A (1924) Quantentheorie des einatomigen, idealen Gases