Breaking Research News from sources other than Breastcancer.org
Comments
-
Prescient Therapeutics (ASX:PTX) reports positive results in breast cancer drug trial
- Prescient Therapeutics (PTX) has reported a high response rate from its Phase 2a clinical trial for breast cancer
- All of the evaluable patients responded to the PTX-200 drug, with the disease completely eradicated in some patients
- All but one of these women are progression-free up to 40 months after treatment
0 -
Olma, your easier to read link didn't work, but when I cut & pasted the words in your link to a search bar, I got the article.
Thanks!
0 -
Taking certain vitamins during breast cancer chemo tied to recurrence, death
Use of dietary supplements that boost levels of antioxidants, iron, vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids appeared to lower the effectiveness of chemotherapy, researchers report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology...
After accounting for other factors that might increase the risk of recurrence or death, they found patients who took any antioxidant at the outset and during chemotherapy - including carotenoids, Coenzyme Q10 and vitamins A, C, and E - were 41% more likely to have their breast cancer return and 40% more likely to die during follow-up compared to patients using no supplements...
Those taking B12 and iron supplements were at greater risk of recurrence and those results were statistically significant. Women taking B12 were 83% more likely to experience a recurrence and 22% more likely to die during follow-up compared to those who did not take those supplements. Women taking omega-3 supplements before and during chemo had a 67% higher likelihood of recurrence and those taking iron supplements were 79% more likely to experience a recurrence...
0 -
Nanoparticle therapeutic restores tumor suppressor [p53], sensitizes cancer cells to treatment [research not on bc but bc is often p53-deficient]
Investigators have long sought a way to restore the activity of tumor suppressor genes such as p53. Most recently, attention has turned to an approach developed at Brigham and Women's Hospital that uses nanotechnology to deliver synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA). Leveraging advancements in nanotechnology, investigators from the Brigham have found that restoring p53 not only delays the growth of p53-deficient liver and lung cancer cells but may also make tumors more vulnerable to cancer drugs known as mTOR inhibitors. The team's findings are published in Science Translational Medicine...
Shi and colleagues, including co-corresponding authors Omid Farokhzad, MD, MBA, (director of Brigham's Center for Nanomedicine) and Wei Tao, Ph.D., (faculty in the Center), and first author Na Kong, MD, used a redox-responsive nanoparticle platform to deliver p53-encoding synthetic mRNA. The synthetic p53 caused cell cycle arrest, cell death and delayed the growth of liver cancer cells and lung cancer cells in which p53 had been depleted. In addition, synthetic p53 made the cells more sensitive to everolimus, a drug which is an mTOR inhibitor. The team reports successful results in multiple in vitro and in vivo models...
The authors note that further preclinical development and evaluation will be needed to explore that translational potential and scalability of the approach as well as its applicability to other p53 mutations and other cancers.
"We expect that this mRNA nanoparticle approach could be applied to many other tumor suppressors and rationally combined with other therapeutic modalities for effective combinatorial cancer treatment," the authors write.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-12-nanoparticle-therapeutic-tumor-suppressor-sensitizes.html
0 -
Adherence to Dietary Recommendations Among Long-Term Breast Cancer Survivors and Cancer Outcome Associations
Fei Wang, Hui Cai, Kai Gu, Liang Shi, Danxia Yu, Minlu Zhang, Wei Zheng, Ying Zheng, Ping-Ping Bao and Xiao-Ou Shu
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; Published OnlineFirst December 23, 2019; doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-19-0872
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2019/12/21/1055-9965.EPI-19-0872.abstract
0 -
Prevalence of Inherited Mutations in Breast Cancer Predisposition Genes among Uganda and Cameroon Women
Babatunde Adedokun, Yonglan Zheng, Paul Ndom, Antony Gakwaya, Timothy Makumbi, Alicia Y Zhou, Toshio F Yoshimatsu, Alex Rodriguez, Ravi K Madduri, Ian T Foster, Aminah Sallam, Olufunmilayo I Olopade and Dezheng Huo
Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; Published OnlineFirst December 23, 2019; doi:10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-19-0506
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2019/12/21/1055-9965.EPI-19-0506.abstract
0 -
re the antioxidants: not a double blind trial, a very small sample size, and the only supplements which had statistical significance in negative outcomes were B12, A, and iron.
0 -
thanks for the comment Santa B. That article scares the crap out of me b/c I took a multivitamin - as per my MO during chemo. The percentages seem Bonkers!
0 -
-
Obesity tied to higher breast cancer therapy-related cardiotoxicity risk
Obese individuals with stage I to III breast cancer who received anthracycline and/or trastuzumab had significantly higher odds of cardiotoxicity, compared with normal-weight patients, according to a French study in PLOS Medicine. Multivariable analysis also showed that obesity and trastuzumab treatment had an independent correlation with cardiotoxicity. Physician's Briefing/HealthDay News
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002989
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002989
0 -
Some supplements during chemo may worsen breast cancer outcomes
Women with breast cancer who received any antioxidant supplement before and during chemotherapy had 41% and 40% increased odds of breast cancer recurrence and mortality at follow-up, compared with those without supplement use, researchers reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The findings also showed 83% and 22% increased recurrence and death risk, respectively, among those who took vitamin B12 supplements, while those with omega-3 supplement intake before and during chemo and those who received iron supplements had a 67% and 79% higher likelihood of breast cancer recurrence, respectively.Reuters
https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.19.01203
DOI: 10.1200/JCO.19.01203 Journal of Clinical Oncology
{This may be duplicative of info already posted but I wanted to be sure the DOI was available for future reference. I also want to point out the potentially obvious - that if supplements were taken to address deficiencies, such as anemia, were the supplements the problem or was the deficiency?}
0 -
Lumpie I thought the same thing...
0 -
It could also be that women who were using iron for anemia or B12 for neuropathy were more likely to have dose reductions or stop chemo early.
I was told to take B12 for neuropathy, along with B6 and biotin.
0 -
I was given to understand that one or more B vitamins (6? 12?) were widely used in Europe (and perhaps in other countries) because they were believed to reduce symptoms of neuropathy. (I don't have a citation.)
0 -
I was also told to take B-6 and B-12 to combat neuropathy. Sadly it didn't work as my feet are dead. On the other hand, I don't have any pain with my neuropathy, so who knows.
0 -
In my country, we are told to run from B12 during treatment. Really, everybody in our support FB group knows to avoid it. Interestingly, I joined a German FB group (not my country, but I speak German) and people were recommending to take B12. That suprised me, as you can imagine.
I was thinking the same as some of you say above. Maybe the defficiency is the problem, B12 is often taken by vegans...
0 -
I was told to take B6 - and that was the only B recommended to me by the Integrative Onc I saw. He did not suggest A or iron.
Here's another angle: I was told to take Omega 3 but ONLY from wild-caught Nordic fish (due to pollutants). I wonder if the 'cheap' brands of various vitamins may have less bioavailability or more pollutants in them....? When you pull up a given vitamin on Amazon there is often a huge range of prices and formulations to pick from... the study did nothing to differentiate those kinds of things.
0 -
When I was first diagnosed, I found a study of men, lung cancer and B12 online . The men who had taken high doses of B12 daily before diagnosis had a higher incidence of lung cancer. That article alone convinced me avoid B12 supplements and I had been using B12 for years on and off because I tend to be anemic (congenitally low hemoglobin so iron supplementation does not help).
After chemo, I found a B complex in CVS that had no more than 100% of RDA of each vitamin. I took that for awhile but now have stopped.
0 -
I buy my Omega 3 from the cancer center. My NP told me most fish oil supplements you get in the store are a waste of money. They use low grade fish and there is very little benefit in taking them.
0 -
'Are you kidding me?': Check out the price tags on 'combination drugs'
"It's an abuse of the system," said one critic. The "business model ... involves gouging insurers and health plans, which ultimately costs consumers."
Read in NBC News: https://apple.news/AfVtvQkE-S6ilLEYIBkKJ-w
Shared from Apple News0 -
AI 'outperforms' doctors diagnosing breast cancer
An international team, including researchers from Google Health and Imperial College London, designed and trained a computer model on X-ray images from nearly 29,000 women.
The algorithm outperformed six radiologists in reading mammograms...
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-50857759
Original abstract in Nature...
International evaluation of an AI system for breast cancer screening
We show an absolute reduction of 5.7% and 1.2% (USA and UK) in false positives and 9.4% and 2.7% in false negatives. We provide evidence of the ability of the system to generalize from the UK to the USA. In an independent study of six radiologists, the AI system outperformed all of the human readers: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) for the AI system was greater than the AUC-ROC for the average radiologist by an absolute margin of 11.5%. We ran a simulation in which the AI system participated in the double-reading process that is used in the UK, and found that the AI system maintained non-inferior performance and reduced the workload of the second reader by 88%. This robust assessment of the AI system paves the way for clinical trials to improve the accuracy and efficiency of breast cancer screening.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1799-6
[Uses Google's Tensorflow machine learning platform, but they aren't releasing the code due to internal dependencies. This isn't the first AI system to help/improve mammogram reading. IBM has a Watson-based system and MIT posted code for their system on github (https://github.com/yala/OncoServe_public) and there are others, including commercially available software aids.]
0 -
marijen, thanks for the link to the 'combination drugs' article. So frustrating.
0 -
Antibiotics failed, then a Minnesota man turned to an old remedy that worked
Haverty, 62, of Brownsville, Minnesota, had 17 surgeries over a decade to rid his right leg of a stubborn infection that lingered after knee-implant surgery.
...his doctor at the Mayo Clinic leveled with him: Antibiotics were proving ineffective against the klebsiella pneumoniae bugs causing Haverty's infection, and he would probably grow so weary of surgeries that he would eventually opt to have the leg removed at the hip.
He had no way of knowing his eventual cure lay in a bacteria-killing virus known as a "phage,"...
The rising incidence of "superbugs," which have evolved to resistant human-made antibiotics, is driving renewed interest in phage therapy. Experimental efforts a century ago to harness phages for infections faded from mainstream science partly because antibiotic drugs worked so well and were relatively cheap. Modern phage researchers and entrepreneurs now have the tools to rapidly analyze the genomes of bacteria and phages, and machine-learning may aid in finding the perfect match.
Adapative Phage Therapeutics (APT) plans to recruit patients in up to four different clinical trials at 10 sites in 2020. The company has nearly 1,000 phages meticulously cataloged and stored and is targeting eight common types of bacterial infections.
{This article isn't cancer specific, but the treatment approach is so fascinating, I wanted to share.}
0 -
Study Backs Breast Cancer Subtype That Had Been Questioned
Increased risk of fatal breast cancer versus ER-positive/PR-negative tumors
"The results support the existence of the ER-negative/PR-positive subtype and indicate that ER-positive/PR-negative and ER-negative/PR-positive tumors are distinct subtypes of breast cancer," the authors concluded. "The assessment of PR status provides valuable information for prognosis and for evaluating the benefit of endocrine therapy. Further studies and clinical trials are needed to optimize the treatment regimens for patients with single-hormone receptor-positive breast cancer."
Conclusions and Relevance In this cohort study, statistically significant distinctions between survival rates of patients with single hormone receptor–positive BC vs double hormone receptor–positive/double hormone receptor–negative BC were observed. Different strategies may be required for patients with single hormone receptor–positive tumors to ensure optimal treatment and maximum benefits from therapies.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2758208
doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.18160
0 -
Lumpie, thanks for posting this. Noticed that you are a double negative too. Hopefully, identifying these subgroups and outcomes will be included in future treatment studies.
0 -
A dear family friend works for an organization that has created a running database of PubMed publications. If you look at the home page for PubMed, it says "PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites." That's a lot of links, and they don't database it to make it easier to search.
The database my friend is working on is called meta.org. Here is a page on how it works. You can create customized searches and get notifications of new research posted. You will need to create an account, but it is FREE and always will be.
My first search term (and you can create multiples) is for triple negative breast cancer. Here is part of the page of searches, so you can see what it looks like.
I have just opened my account this week, so I am barely figuring out how to deal with it. Those of you who are even more research oriented than I might have a good time with this.
0 -
Coolio, thanks, MM!
0 -
Newly discovered behavior of known chemical compound might lead to breast cancer drugs that keep [ER+] tumors from coming back
...Tamoxifen, and drugs like it, block the ER-alpha receptor, while fulvestrant and similar drugs induce the cell to degrade it. By blocking or degrading the ER-alpha receptor, these anti-hormonal drugs greatly reduce the signal for the cancer cell to grow and reproduce. But, as Prossnitz and his team have previously shown, they also activate GPER, and GPER signals the cell to keep growing and reproducing.
Most breast cancer cells follow the ER-alpha signal and die on schedule when ER-alpha is blocked or degraded. But a very small number of breast cancer cells may follow the GPER signal and survive. And those cells can grow into aggressive tumors that no longer respond to anti-hormonal drugs.
Prossnitz and his team discovered a compound some years ago called AB-1 that binds to ER-alpha but does not activate GPER, thereby avoiding the undesirable side effect of current anti-hormonal drugs. In their Cell Chemical Biology paper, they report their studies that describe AB-1's unique binding and activity behavior.
https://www.newswise.com//articles/discovery-could-lead-to-new-breast-cancer-drugs
0 -
Genetic study provides most comprehensive map of risk to date of breast cancer risk
A major international study of the genetics of breast cancer has identified more than 350 DNA 'errors' that increase an individual's risk of developing the disease. The scientists involved say these errors may influence as many as 190 genes...
In this new study, researchers from hundreds of institutions worldwide collaborated to compare the DNA of 110,000 breast cancer patients against that of some 90,000 healthy controls. By looking in much closer detail than was previously possibly, they identified 352 risk variants. It is not yet clear exactly how many genes these target, but the researchers have identified 191 genes with reasonable confidence; less than one in five of these had been previously recognised.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200107122305.htm
0 -
New Compounds Block Master Regulator of Cancer Growth, Metastasis
Scientists have developed new drug compounds that thwart the pro-cancer activity of FOXM1, a transcription factor that regulates the activity of dozens of genes. The new compounds suppress tumor growth in human cells and in mouse models of several types of human breast cancer...
"FOXM1 is a key factor that makes breast cancer and many other cancers more aggressive and more difficult to treat," Benita Katzenellenbogen said. "Because it is a master regulator of cancer growth and metastasis, there has been great interest in developing compounds that would be effective in blocking it."The research is promising, but preliminary, the scientists said. Full development of new anti-cancer drug agents can take more than a decade from this stage of discovery.
https://scitechdaily.com/new-compounds-kill-breast-cancer-cells-and-block-tumor-growth/
0
