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 →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney Did you know that there is a link between excess weight and increased risk of getting cancer? The International Agency for Research on Cancer has recognized a link between being overweight and having an increased risk of cancer in 13 sites of the body. Strikingly, the CDC reported that... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney Note: Throughout this article, I will use phrases such as "patients with overweight/obesity" instead of "overweight/obese patients." This is because the field is trying to move away from using disease states as descriptors. Another example would be a preference for saying "patients with diabetes" instead of "diabetics." I know... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney As we have written about before, cancer immunotherapy aims to make use of the body’s own immune cells to attack cancer cells, thereby preventing their continued growth. However, the body has a system of checks and balances in place to make sure that the immune system does not accidentally... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney What can humans do better than robots? For most of history, the answer to that question has been.. everything. However, the balance of power is rapidly shifting away from warm, fleshy, humans toward cold, calculating, processing power. Did you know that a few years ago, an artificial intelligence (AI)... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney A research team from UC Berkeley, UCSF, and UNC Chapel Hill has developed a new strategy to prevent unwanted side effects of toxic chemotherapy drugs. Often, choosing a dose of chemotherapy has to be balanced between how effective it will be at killing tumor cells and how toxic it... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney A recent study has found evidence that adolescents who are overweight or have obesity may be at a 407% increased risk of getting pancreatic cancer, the 6th most deadly form of cancer in the world. To determine this relationship, Levi et al. conducted a study of 1,087,358 Israeli Jewish... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Morgan McSweeney CRISPR-Cas9 is the molecular gene editing system that has inspired hopes for a solution to genetic disease. By studying how bacteria use the CRISPR-Cas system to defend themselves against bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), scientists have developed methods to use those same molecular scissors to cut out human genes... Continue Reading →
Morgan McSweeney As Alex Woodell recently described, the preclinical research community is in a quiet crisis. Somewhere between 50% and 90% of results from early-stage academic cancer research are unable to be reproduced by industry scientists. Studies by several large multinational pharmaceutical companies and a number of other independent research groups have confirmed what they... Continue Reading →
Morgan McSweeney A group of researchers from the University of California - San Francisco recently found that the presence of a certain group of immune cells in tumors (“stimulatory dendritic cells,” or SDCs) can predict better cancer outcomes, at least in melanoma patients. For example, in patients treated with checkpoint inhibitors (drugs that work by... Continue Reading →
Morgan McSweeney Cancer is not a single disease. It is a broad term that describes a number of related conditions in which cells’ growth has begun to bypass the usual checks and balances. To study the spectrum of cancers, the National Institutes of Health have established The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a collaborative project aimed... Continue Reading →
Morgan McSweeney What percent of cancer cases are due to lifestyle choices or environmental conditions, and are therefore potentially preventable? Take a guess: 10%, 25%, 75%, or 90%? A paper by Anand et. al set out to answer exactly this question nearly ten years ago, pulling data from large-scale epidemiological studies across a large range... Continue Reading →
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