Category Health/Medical

Most people relate cholesterol to heart health, but it is also a critical component in the growth and spread of brain cancer. VCU Massey Cancer Center researcher Suyun Huang, Ph.D., 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.

The mean survival of patients with the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is 14 months. The need to find new, effective treatments is urgent and has driven Huang, a member of the Cancer Biology research program at Massey, to detail the workings of numerous genes, proteins, enzymes and other cellular components that contribute to brain cancer growth...

Another step towards understanding Alzheimer’s disease has been taken at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre. Molecular biologist Gilbert Bernier, and professor of neurosciences at Université de Montréal, has discovered a new function for the BMI1 gene, which is known to inhibit brain aging. The results of his work have just been published in Nature Communications.

In his laboratory, Bernier was able to establish that BMI1 was required to prevent the DNA of neurons from disorganizing in a particular way called G4 structures. This phenomenon occurs in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, but not in healthy elderly people...

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have identified a drug candidate that blocks the uptake of glutamine, a key food source for many tumors, and slows the growth of melanoma. The drug is a small molecule that targets a glutamine transporter, SLC1A5, which pumps the nutrient into cancer cells — offering a promising new approach for treating melanoma and other cancers. The study was published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

“While great strides have been made recently in the treatment of melanoma, many patients’ tumors become resistant to therapy, and this has become a major obstacle in the successful treatment of the disease,” says Ze’ev Ronai, Ph.D...

A team of researchers has found disrupting the interaction between cancer cells and certain immune cells is more effective at killing cancer cells than current immunotherapy treatments.

The findings, which include studies in cell lines and animal models, appeared in JCI Insight and focus on a protein called CD6 as a target for a new approach to immunotherapy.

Over the past two decades, new approaches to cancer treatment have been developed that block immune checkpoints, which are receptors on the surface of certain immune cells, like natural killer T cells. Cancer exploits these immune cells and render them dormant.

This treatment, called checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy, gives these immune cells a chance to fight back...