Here at OncoBites, a team of cancer professionals and advocates has gathered to share cutting-edge research with a non-specialist audience. We understand that jargon and isolated professional communities have made science feel inaccessible to most people, even people considering the field. In addition, paywalls on articles can make trying to investigate topics alone a challenge.... Continue Reading →
Diet and cancer metabolism – A vulnerable axis to explore in cancer therapy
Reading time: 5 minutes Diana Moreira The need for new and improved anti-tumor therapies has led the research field to implement different strategies to reduce, and ideally cease, tumor development. With growing publications in the field of cancer metabolism in recent years, different tumor vulnerabilities are being uncovered, increasing the likelihood of finding new therapeutic... Continue Reading →
Modeling Aging and Cancer: Are Lab Mice different From Their Wild Cousins?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Josh Ghofrani Mice are the principal model organisms in biomedical research. We rely on mice because of their close genetic and physiologic approximation to humans, as well as their relative ease of care and breeding. No model system is perfect, and many limitations are widely acknowledged in the research community. However,... Continue Reading →
Telemedical Applications for Managing Cancer Care During COVID-19
Reading time: 6 minutes Andrew C. Griggs, Jordan E. Rogers, Elizabeth H. Lazzara Research Engineering and Applied Collaborations in Healthcare (REACH) Lab Patients with cancer may be at greater risk of contracting or developing complications related to COVID-19. Given the lack of a vaccine or specific antiviral therapy for COVID-19 at this time, the large... Continue Reading →
What is my disease condition?
Significance of Minimal Residual Disease Reading time: 3 minutes Aishwarya Subramanian Leukemia is a condition in which the number of white blood cells increase because of malfunctions in blood-forming tissues. White blood cells that provide immunity to the body and protect it from diseases undergo genetic alterations and mutations causing them to undergo rapid division.... Continue Reading →
The capability of companion diagnostics for selecting patients for immunotherapy
Reading time: 4 minutes Aileen I Fernandez When a foreign substance such as a cancer cell presents itself in the human body, it is able to communicate with cells of the human immune system. The cancer cell signals the immune system, telling it “Hey! Pump the brakes!”, thus instructing the immune system to not kill... Continue Reading →
Looking Ahead: How Climate Change Could Affect Cancer
Reading time: 4 minutes Brittany Avin McKelvey Climate change is a global issue with far-reaching effects on society. It is caused partly by greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, that trap the sun’s radiation in our atmosphere. While some warming and cooling effects are part of Earth’s natural cycle of climate change, the burning of fossil... Continue Reading →
Cancer and COVID-19: How do you care for patients when hospitals are danger zones?
Reading time: 7 minutes Sara Musetti Disclaimer: This article is based on summaries of academic studies and medical society guidelines. It is not intended as medical advice; if you find yourself needing to seek care during this pandemic, please contact your doctor for a discussion based on your hospital’s resources and your specific needs. The... Continue Reading →
Welcome to the (DNA) Neighborhood
Reading time: 3 minutes Rachel Cherney Six feet. Two meters. This is the length of DNA we have in each one of our cells. That’s almost the height of Michael Jordan! But those six feet of DNA need to fit into a tiny space that is between 5-10 micrometers. To put it into perspective, that's... Continue Reading →
CDK4/6 Kinase Inhibitors: Limiting Chemotherapy Toxicity
Reading time: 5 minutes Chris Wang Chemotherapy is a mainstay of cancer treatment, yet many times it is temporarily withheld or stopped due to significant toxicity. This is because chemotherapy drugs cannot differentiate between killing cancer cells and killing fast growing healthy cells, such as cells in your bone marrow. These cells divide quickly because... Continue Reading →
OncoBites Statement in Support of Black Lives Matter
This is not a normal week in America, and yet, in many ways, it is. Protesters have taken to the streets across the country and around the world to demand justice for the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, three Black Americans who have been murdered in the past month, two of... Continue Reading →
When It Comes to Cancer, Could Prevention Be the New Cure?
Larissa Biggers Reading time: 3 minutes A cure for a disease such as malaria, polio, or cancer is a treatment that eliminates it. A cure can work on an individual level or a group level. If a treatment is effective for a group such that no disease is left in the population, the condition is... Continue Reading →
Live Forever? Cancer and the Darker Side of Telomerase
Reading time: 5 minutes Brittany Avin McKelvey Many of us are enticed by the possibility of extending our lives, towards the goal of one day being able to live forever. This wish may be closer to becoming reality with the promise of some research in which the activation of only one enzyme, usually turned off... Continue Reading →
Building a Highway to Tumors
Sara Musetti Estimated reading time: 5 minutes It seems talking about the immune system and how it can fight cancer is all the rage these days, especially here at OncoBites. But talking about it can be tricky, especially because most people seldom think about their immune system. It’s a part of your body, but… which... Continue Reading →
Addressing racial and ethnic disparity in cancer research
Reading time: 5 minutes Aileen I Fernandez Cancer is a complex disease associated with multiple factors. To fully understand the disease and find treatments, these multiple factors should be addressed. One of the intractable layers associated with this disease is the health disparity. The disparity here refers to a greater disease burden seen in one... Continue Reading →
Probing Molecular Vibrations For Cancer Diagnosis
Reading time: 4 minutes Jessica Desamero Molecules can be portrayed as “ball-and-spring” models, where the balls are atoms and the springs are the chemical bonds that tether them. Just as a spring, the chemical bonds can be moved around in a variety of ways to cause masses to vibrate as well as move differently and... Continue Reading →
Ferocious ferroptosis- programmed cell death in cancer treatment
Reading time: 6 minutes Kate Secombe Have you ever thought about how the cells in our body die? There are many ways a cell can die due to both external or internal factors, playing a role in keeping the body healthy and removing dangerous cells from the body system. When cells fail to listen to... Continue Reading →
Why Cancer is Hard to Treat
Reading time: 4 minutes Daniel Zhong Before we believe headlines proclaiming “Cancer is cured”, it is crucial to understand that developing a therapy that universally cures all cancers is highly unrealistic as our knowledge surrounding mechanisms of cancer progression advances. While we do have non-curative treatments for some types of cancer such as chemotherapy and... Continue Reading →
The Micro Problem with Cancer
MaryAnn Bowyer Reading Time: 3 minutes When we think of cancer cells, we often imagine a mastermind cell that has somehow managed to evade all of our body’s natural defenses as well as even modern day science. However, years of scientific research and publications have shown that the “mastermind” behind this particular cell is, in... Continue Reading →
Melanoma patients with private insurance are diagnosed earlier than those with Medicaid or no health insurance
Reading time: 3 minutes Morgan McSweeney Skin melanoma is the 5th most common type of cancer in the United States. Strikingly, 1 in 5 Americans develop skin cancer by the age of 70, and an average of 2 people die from skin cancer each hour. However, if detected while the tumor is still only present... Continue Reading →
Gene therapy vs Cancer: A promising yet challenging road
Reading time: 5 minutes Varshit Dusad Gene therapy has rapidly become one of the most promising new medical developments of our time. It has significant advantages over traditional therapies including the potential for one-time dosage instead of recurring treatment and higher specificity compared to traditional chemotherapy. Cancer is a genetic disease! It occurs when normal... Continue Reading →
Repurposing existing vaccines for cancer treatment
Reading time: 5 minutes Prathyusha Konda For the past decade, a growing area of cancer research has been focused on cancer immunotherapies. From the Nobel prize-winning checkpoint inhibitor therapy to cancer vaccines, the idea behind immunotherapies is to boost or activate the immune system. While the therapies being developed may be new, the idea behind... Continue Reading →
Cancer and CRISPR: A Promising Future
Reading Time: 4 minutes MaryAnn Bowyer Reading Time: 4 minutes It is a known fact that research into cancer treatment has become difficult due to the high specificity of causes behind tumor development. Indeed, it appears that for every step forward in terms of cancer treatment there is also a slight step backward. It is... Continue Reading →
Risk of Infection in Cancer Patients: Life in the Time of Coronavirus
Reading time: 3 minutes Manisit Das It is a scary and anxious moment for many of us, and if you are on the internet, it is hard to miss updates about the latest coronavirus disease, COVID-19. The viral disease is characterized by flu-like symptoms and may cause respiratory infections in certain individuals, was declared a... Continue Reading →
Biology Guided Radiotherapy: technology to rapidly and precisely clear scattered tumors
Reading time: 3 minutes Michael Marand You may be familiar with the handy ‘Find My iPhone’ feature that comes with Apple cell phones. This feature uses radio waves from cell towers to direct you precisely to the spot where you dropped your device. Following similar principles, physicians can use imaging techniques to obtain signals from... Continue Reading →
A New Paradigm for Cancer Drug Development
Reading time: 4 minutes Brittany Avin McKelvey We are in a hayday for cancer therapies, as research has surpassed traditional chemotherapeutics. New drugs, new treatment regimens, and even new drug classes are approved each day, broadening the horizons of oncology. The newest types of drugs to recently gain FDA approval are tissue agnostic drugs. (See... Continue Reading →
Preventing cell death decreases breast cancer recurrence
Reading time: 5 minutes Keighley Reisenauer Breast cancer is a collection of diseases, organized into subtypes designating which treatments may be best for the patient and how aggressive the cancer is likely to be. One thing that is universal across all subtypes, though, is what makes them worse: metastasis. When cancer metastasizes, it spreads across... Continue Reading →
Human Factors and Cancer Care
Reading time: 4 minutes Jordan E. Rogers, Andrew C. Griggs, Elizabeth H. Lazzara Research Engineering and Applied Collaborations in Healthcare (REACH) Lab Cancer is a prevalent disease that manifests drastically differently across individuals due to the interplay of multiple factors. Due to the disease’s multifaceted nature, the provision of safe, quality care within cancer is... Continue Reading →
Cancer Cell Metabolism: A Potential Therapeutic Target
Reading time: 5 minutes Aishwarya Subramanian The life cycle of cells is a key piece of our understanding of cancer; as cells grow, they divide and produce two new “daughter” cells. For the cells to divide, grow and survive, it requires energy which they gain by metabolising glucose. However, every healthy cell that divides has... Continue Reading →
Mitochondria: the Canary in the Coal Mine
Reading time: 3 minutes Alex S. Woodell The tale of the canary in the coal mine dates back to 1911, when British miners began carrying caged canaries with them underground as a means of detecting toxic gases. The idea of using canaries as an early indicator is credited to John Scott Haldane, a Scottish physiologist... Continue Reading →
How can we study cancer more accurately?
Reading time: 3 minutes Rachel Cherney If you have read other articles on Oncobites, you know that cancer is a collection of many diseases, and these diseases are complex. Cancer cells don’t live on their own; rather, they live among the normal tissue cells, immune cells, and bacteria in your body. Additionally, cancer cells can... Continue Reading →
