Cancer

This is an exciting time in the development of new agents for the management of advanced prostate cancer and the future looks bright, say Dr David Galvin and Dr Gerard McVey.

Scientists from the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at TCD have made a significant discovery of a new biomarker that could help overcome resistance to newer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, such as Herceptin, for HER2-positive cancers.

A multi-centre study led by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, has found that high-dose supplementation with both the trace element selenium and vitamin E increase the risk of high-grade prostate cancer.

Researchers have found the breast cancer drug tamoxifen in samples of a widely-available bodybuilding dietary supplement.

Johns Hopkins scientists say a previously known but little-studied chemical compound targets and shuts down a common cancer process.

Researchers at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in the USA have confirmed that using a plasma thermogram — the heat profile from a person’s blood —  can serve as an indicator for the presence or absence of cervical cancer, including the stage of cancer.

The proportion of alcohol- related deaths from cancer in Ireland is higher than the European average, according to a new study, which calculated Ireland’s cancer incidence and mortality rates attributable to alcohol over a 10-year period between 2001 and 2010.

Adults in the UK and Ireland continue to have shorter survival than the European average for many common cancers, particularly colon, (52 per cent vs 57 per cent) ovary (31 per cent vs 38 per cent) and kidney, (48 per cent vs 61 per cent) but have about average survival rates for rectum, breast, prostate, melanoma of the skin, and

Women who are members of families with BRCA2 mutations but who test negative for the family-specific BRCA2 mutations are still at greater risk of developing breast cancer compared with women in the general population, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

What could some day be the first blood test for the early detection of breast cancer was shown in preliminary studies to identify successfully the presence of breast cancer cells from serum biomarkers, say the Houston Methodist Research Institute scientists who are developing the technology.