Acinetobacter baumannii is a pathogen that causes hospital-acquired infections that are very difficult to treat, because they are resistant to most currently available antibiotics. As one of the World Health Organization’s three critical priority pathogens, new antibiotics for Acinetobacter baumannii are urgently needed, and is now one step closer to being tackled, as…...

Among women in Chicago, African Americans and Hispanics were exposed to higher levels of ambient toxic heavy metals compared with non-Hispanic whites, and this increased exposure correlated with increased incidence of breast cancer. Garth Rauscher, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public…...

Some colorectal cancer patients with a certain gene mutation benefit from a chemotherapy drug called cetuximab, although the mechanism of how this drug worked was unknown. Scientists have combined computational biology with experimental investigations to discover, for the first time, the mechanism for why these patients respond to the drug,…...

For the past few decades, platinum based cisplatin has been a compound of choice in the treatment of many cancers. It is especially effective at halting testicular cancer, with a success rate of more than 90%. However, the usefulness of cisplatin and other metal based cancer drugs has been limited due to…...

A recent study has found that men with inflammatory bowel disease may be up to five times more likely to have prostate cancer than those without the condition, and when they have it, the cancer is more aggressive. The findings, from a single-center analysis that included more than 10,000 patients,…...

When breast cancer cells spread through the body, they do so mainly through the lymph system that normally removes excess fluid and waste products from our tissues. Now, scientists from the group of Professor Massimiliano Mazzone (VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology) identified a novel subset of immune cells, called…...

Why does breast cancer sometimes recur after treatment? A new study suggests that in part, the answer may lie in the effect of adjuvant hormone therapy on some cancer cells. Luca Magnani, who is a principal research fellow in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London in the United…...

Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a method to significantly extend the life of gene circuits used to instruct microbes to do things such as produce and deliver drugs, break down chemicals and serve as environmental sensors. Most of the circuits that synthetic biologists insert into…...

Marijuana has long been used to manage pain from cancer treatments. The study from Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is different because it discovered cannabis might go beyond treatment for cancer-related pain and nausea. The study found that flavonoids in cannabis show potential in slowing pancreatic cancer tumor growth and stopping the…...

Scientists may have found a way to pull down the protective wall that surrounds tumors, potentially re-exposing them to the killing power of the immune system and immunotherapy treatments, according to a study part funded by Cancer Research UK and published in EBioMedicine. Although this is early research in the lab,…...