Credit: Courtesy UHN
TORONTO (February 5, 2021) - A clinical study led by Dr. Jordan Feld, a liver specialist at Toronto Centre for Liver Disease, University Health Network (UHN), showed an experimental antiviral drug can significantly speed up recovery for COVID-19 outpatients - patients who do not need to be hospitalized.
This could become an important intervention to treat infected patients and help curb community spread, while COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out this year. This treatment has large therapeutic potential, especially at this moment as we see aggressive variants of the virus spreading around the globe which are less sensitive to both vaccines and treatment with antibodies, says Dr. Feld, who is also Co-Director of the Schwartz Reisman Liver Research Centre and the R. Phelan Chair in Translational Liver Research at UHN.
Scientists were able to inhibit the hibernation-like state, allowing chemo to again be effective
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Posted: Jan 22, 2021 4:25 PM ET | Last Updated: January 22
Scientists discovered that cancer cells that develop a resistance to chemotherapy go into a hibernation-like state survive the treatment, just like bears hibernate to wait out the winter.(Chris Hondros / Getty Images) comments
Quirks and Quarks6:37Cancer cells hibernate to hide from chemotherapy
Chemotherapy drugs can work wonders, especially early in a person s treatment, but over time, they may stop working. Researchers have found a reason why: cancer cells can enter a state akin to hibernation to avoid the toxic onslaught of the drugs.
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Adding the Wee1 inhibitor adavosertib to gemcitabine reduced the risk of disease progression and death in women with recurrent, platinum-resistant or -refractory ovarian cancer, a randomized phase II trial showed.
For the primary endpoint of progression-free survival (PFS) in 99 patients with high-grade serous tumors, those assigned to gemcitabine plus adavosertib had a median PFS of 4.6 months, as compared with 3.0 months with gemcitabine plus placebo (HR 0.55, 95% CI 0.35-0.90,
P=0.015), reported Amit Oza, MD, of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, and colleagues.
Median overall survival was 11.4 months versus 7.2 months, respectively (HR 0.56, 95% CI 0.35-0.91,
P=0.017). In advanced-stage or heavily pretreated high-grade serous ovarian cancer, few options remain after conventional therapy, the authors wrote in
TELUS launches newest Health for Good mobile clinic to support Toronto’s most marginalized citizens
TORONTO, Jan. 21, 2021 Today, TELUS announced the expansion of the company’s innovative
Health for Good program with Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre (CHC) and University Health Network’s (UHN) Social Medicine Program. The Parkdale Queen West Mobile Health Clinic powered by TELUS Health, a specially-equipped clinic on wheels, will provide essential primary health and harm reduction services directly to underserved persons in neighbourhoods in the mid-west region of Toronto. In addition, the clinic will enable mobile COVID-19 testing and vaccination efforts at homeless sheltering sites, congregate housing for marginalized populations and in areas with high positivity rates.
A single genetic test can identify the presence and cause of mismatch repair deficiency
Researchers have developed a new integrated genetic/epigenetic DNA-sequencing protocol known as MultiMMR that can identify the presence and cause of mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency in a single test from a small sample of DNA in colon, endometrial, and other cancers. This alternative to complex, multi-step testing workflows can also determine causes of MMR deficiency often missed by current clinical tests. Their results are presented in the
Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier.
MMR genes monitor and repair errors that can occur in normal cell replication and recombination. In some inherited and acquired cancers, one or more of the MMR genes are deactivated. The impact of MultiMMR is broad. Tumors with MMR deficiency respond well to new cancer immunotherapies, explains lead investigator Trevor J. Pugh, PhD, Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto; Princess M