Schlagwort: cell

Harnessing the organization of the cell surface

3. Dezember 2021
Scientists have developed a new method to determine how proteins are organized on the surface of cells. Insights gained with the technology could lead to the development of novel drugs to fight cancer.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and artificial intelligence (AI) can detect early signs of tumor cell death after novel therapy

2. Dezember 2021
A recent study demonstrates that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to detect early signs of tumor cell death in response to a novel virus-based cancer therapy.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Discovery of a Stem-like T cell in type 1 diabetes holds potential for improving cancer immunotherapy

2. Dezember 2021
As an autoimmune disease, Type 1 diabetes raises important questions about immune cell activity that have broad implications for immunotherapy.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

The prostate cancer cell that got away

17. November 2021
Researchers have pioneered a new method to track the progression of prostate cancer in mice, from its birth to its spread into other tissues. This approach allows researchers to study the origins of prostate cancer in a more realistic context than traditional methods allow.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Toward ‚off-the-shelf’ immune cell therapy for cancer

17. November 2021
Immunotherapies, which harness the body’s natural defenses to combat disease, have revolutionized the treatment of aggressive and deadly cancers. But often, these therapies — especially those based on immune cells — must be tailored to the individual patient, costing valuable time and pushing their price into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Using T cells to target malignant brain tumors

16. November 2021
Doctors and scientists have successfully tested a neoantigen-specific transgenic immune cell therapy for malignant brain tumors for the first time using an experimental model in mice.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

New technique may lead to safer stem cell transplants

12. November 2021
Studying mice, researchers have developed a method of stem cell transplantation that does not require radiation or chemotherapy. Instead, the strategy takes an immunotherapeutic approach, combining the targeted elimination of blood-forming stem cells in the bone marrow with immune-modulating drugs to prevent the immune system from rejecting the new donor stem cells.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

CRISPR screen identifies new anti-inflammatory drug target

12. November 2021
A metabolic enzyme that has been studied in cancer biology and is important for T cell function may offer a new target for anti-inflammatory therapeutics, researchers have discovered. They report that inhibiting or genetically deleting the enzyme, called MTHFD2, reduced disease severity in multiple inflammatory disease models.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Landmark study points to source of rapid aging, chronic inflammation in people living with HIV

10. November 2021
In a groundbreaking study of people living with HIV, researchers found that elusive white blood cells called neutrophils play a role in impaired T cell functions and counts, as well as the associated chronic inflammation that is common with the virus.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

High cell membrane tension constrains the spread of cancer

9. November 2021
The membranes of cancer cells are more pliant than the membranes of normal cells. A research collaboration has discovered that cancer invasion and migration can be supressed in mice by manipulating the stiffness of the cell membrane. Hopefully this will contribute towards the development of new treatments that target the physical characteristics of cancer cells.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

It takes cellular teamwork to heal the intestine

4. November 2021
A meticulous single-cell analytical approach to study the repair process of rotavirus-caused injury in an animal model revealed that the damaged epithelium contains a variety of cell types involved in repairing it through broad coordinated responses that ultimately heal the damaged tissue.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Uncovering how injury to the pancreas impacts cancer formation

30. Oktober 2021
Pioneering research shows that acinar cells in the pancreas form new cell types to mitigate injury but are then susceptible to cancerous mutations.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Researchers target tumors with intracellular precision

27. Oktober 2021
A non-toxic, bacteria-based system can detect when it is inside a cancer cell and then release its payload of therapeutic drugs directly into the cell. The work could lead to effective, targeted therapies for currently untreatable cancers, such as liver or metastatic breast cancer.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

The human immune system is an early riser

19. Oktober 2021
Circadian clocks, which regulate most of the physiological processes of living beings over a rhythm of about 24 hours, are one of the most fundamental biological mechanisms. By deciphering the cell migration mechanisms underlying the immune response, scientists have shown that the activation of the immune system is modulated according to the time of day. Indeed, the migration of immune cells from the skin to the lymph nodes oscillates over a 24-hours period. Immune function is highest in the resting phase, just before activity resumes — in the afternoon for mice, which are nocturnal animals, and early morning for humans. These results suggest that the time of day should possibly be taken into account when administering vaccines or immunotherapies against cancer, in order to increase their effectiveness.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Molecular atlas of small cell lung cancer reveals unusual cell type that could explain why it’s so aggressive

17. Oktober 2021
Stem-like cells that make up only a tiny fraction of the total cells in a lung tumor could be the key to stopping the disease’s deadly spread, say researchers.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Mito warriors: Scientists discover how T cell assassins reload their weapons to kill and kill again

15. Oktober 2021
Researchers have discovered how T cells — an important component of our immune system — are able keep on killing as they hunt down and kill cancer cells, repeatedly reloading their toxic weapons.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Solving mystery of rare cancers directly caused by HIV

14. Oktober 2021
For nearly a decade, scientists have known that HIV integrates itself into genes in cells that have the potential to cause cancer. And when this happens in animals with other retroviruses, those animals often develop cancer. But, perplexingly and fortunately, that isn’t regularly happening in people living with HIV. A new study reveals why doctors aren’t seeing high rates of T cell lymphomas — or cancers of the immune system — in patients with HIV.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Break through the tumor’s protective shield

13. Oktober 2021
The immune system protects the body from cancer. To protect healthy body cells from its own immune system, they have developed a protective shield: the protein CD47 is a so called ‚don’t eat me‘ signal, which tells the immune cells to stand back. Tumor cells exploit this CD47-based protection strategy for evading the immune system, by increasing presentation of CD47 on their cell surface. A team has now developed a therapy concept for programming the tumor cells to produce on their own a CD47-blocking and immune-activation fusion protein. This therapy approach could stop tumor growth.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

New way to image whole organisms in 3D brings key skin color pigment into focus

6. Oktober 2021
To understand the biological underpinnings of skin and hair pigmentation and related diseases such as albinism or melanoma, scientists and doctors need quantitative, three-dimensional information about the architecture, content and location of pigment cells. Researchers have developed a new technique that allows scientists to visualize every cell containing melanin pigment in 3D, in whole zebrafish.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

How high-fat diets allow cancer cells to go unnoticed

30. September 2021
The immune system relies on cell surface tags to recognize cancer cells. Researchers discovered mice who ate high-fat diets produced less of these tags on their intestinal cells, suppressing the ability of immune cells to identify and eliminate intestinal tumors. The high-fat diet also reduced the presence of certain bacteria in the mice’s gut, which normally helps maintain the production of these tags.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

Discovery of mechanics of drug targets for COVID-19

28. September 2021
Researchers have discovered the working mechanism of potential drug targets for various diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and even COVID-19. The findings uncover the inner workings of cell receptors that are involved in cancer progression and inflammatory diseases.

Quelle: Sciencedaily

A global assessment of cancer genomic alterations in epigenetic mechanisms

5. März 2015

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

23. Februar 2015

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

23. Februar 2015

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.

Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions

23. Februar 2015

Tomasetti and Vogelstein show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated with the total number of divisions of the normal self-renewing cells maintaining that tissue’s homeostasis. These results suggest that only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to bad luck, that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells.

Tomasetti C, Vogelstein B (2015): Variation in cancer risk among tissues can be explained by the number of stem cell divisions. Science 2 January 2015: Vol. 347 no. 6217 pp. 78-81 DOI: 10.1126/science.1260825