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IMAGE: A compound in avocados may ultimately offer a route to better leukemia treatment, says a new University of Guelph study. view more
Credit: University of Guelph
A compound in avocados may ultimately offer a route to better leukemia treatment, says a new University of Guelph study.
The compound targets an enzyme that scientists have identified for the first time as being critical to cancer cell growth, said Dr. Paul Spagnuolo, Department of Food Science.
Published recently in the journal
Blood, the study focused on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which is the most devastating form of leukemia. Most cases occur in people over age 65, and fewer than 10 per cent of patients survive five years after diagnosis.
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New technology could allow more cancer patients to benefit from immunotherapy Naoto Hirano, a professor in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, and his colleagues have developed a more powerful way to identify immune cells capable of recognizing and eliminating cancer cells (photo by UHN StRIDe Team)
Professor Naoto Hirano of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine and collaborators have developed a new technology that rigorously and robustly identifies the immune cells that are capable of recognizing and eliminating cancer cells.
The findings, published in Nature Biotechnology, pave the way for novel immunotherapies to help more patients, regardless of their genetic ancestry, live longer and healthier lives.
Study highlights Evolutionary Aspect of Tumour Development labmate-online.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from labmate-online.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
OICR’s Drug Discovery Team is made up of 26 drug discovery scientists housed in state-of-art facilities with a mission to help Ontario’s researchers efficiently translate cancer related discoveries into novel oncology therapies. This team has “identified five of the most promising early stage oncology drug development projects in the province,” said Dr. Tom Hudson, the OICR’s president and scientific director. “OICR is pleased to support these Ontario-based research projects and we look forward to collaborating with our partners to help move them to the next stage of development,” he added.
The selected projects address a range of cancers, including hematological malignancies, triple negative breast cancer and colon cancer. They come from major institutions across Ontario and were selected from a province-wide call for proposals to identify promising oncology research that would benefit from OICR’s expertise in drug discovery.
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Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, as part of an international collaboration of scientists through the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium, have analysed the whole genomes of tumour samples from over 2,600 patients with different types of cancer. They identified a high prevalence of genetic diversity within individual tumours, which they further characterised. Their findings confirm that, even at late stages of development, tumour evolution is driven by changes that benefit the cancer.
When cancer cells divide, errors occur in the process of copying their DNA. These copying errors mean that different tumours can be made up of cells presenting a wide range of genetic diversity. This variation is a challenge for doctors as a treatment that works for one group of genetically related tumour cells, called a subclone, may not be effective against another. And certain subclones can initiate tumour spread or drug resistance.