Reading Time: 4 minutes Daniel Zhong Imagine this scenario: You are 90 years old, with gray hair and wrinkled skin. You always carry around a walking cane everywhere you go because the slightest movements from sitting down on a chair to brushing your teeth in the morning cause you tremendous pain in your joints, muscles,... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Payal Yokota Can viruses be heroes? It is well-known that some viruses can cause severe infections in the body. However, when modified in the correct way, these small molecular entities can be used as an additional arsenal in the immune tool bag, to kill even bigger and scarier enemies… such as... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Kaitlyn Felsheim The nervous system is integral for communication between the brain and the rest of the body. It is responsible for relaying messages to breathe, eat, feel, blink, and perform other vital tasks. Neurons play a huge role in tissue development and specification, and it turns out that cancer cells... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 2 minutes Rachel Cherney *This article does not take the place of professional medical advice. Consult with your doctor* One of the most limiting aspects of drug development is the time it takes to design, optimize, and implement new drugs, which in turn limits patient treatment and survival. Unfortunately, for patients suffering from... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Aishwarya Subramanian Breast cancer has shown to be a really aggressive condition. About 12% of the women in the US are known to develop invasive breast cancer, where the disease spreads into surrounding healthy tissues [a]. Now it is well established that breast cancer is a very heterogeneous disease. Genome studies... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Kate Secombe Cancer treatment- it’s not fun! The treatment can take hours in the hospital, it makes you feel fatigued and has a range of difficult side-effects, including nausea, vomiting, hair loss, and memory problems. But today, I want to focus on one, in particular, mucositis, and look at the research... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Kedar Puvar Designing new anticancer compounds is often a deliberate process, where the mechanism of action involves the blocking of a certain target, like a receptor or other cellular protein. Researchers would then optimize potential leads until a potent and effective drug is ready for clinical trials. This pipeline is considered... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Tara Fernandez Originally designed to treat cancer, a new study shows genetically-engineered T-cells could also be a game-changer for treating heart disease. In a world first, a recent study has uncovered a new use for an approved cancer therapy - for fixing broken hearts. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Alex S. Woodell In my previous article, we weathered the cytokine storm, a deadly immune response that can occur following chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy. Despite this risk, CAR-T therapy is quite effective in treating blood cancers such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Unfortunately, not all patients respond favorably... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Bekah Schulz It is well known that biological sex is an important factor in certain types of cancer. Obvious cancers that fall into this category are breast, prostate, uterine, and cervical cancer. These depend on sex-specific organs, as well as hormone levels, that vary between men and women. A previous Oncobites... 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: 3 minutes Aishwarya Subramanian Cancer immunotherapy has gained a lot of traction in the last few years, as several novel therapeutics have made their way into the clinic. Among these new therapeutics, bispecific antibodies are some of the most unique. Unlike traditional antibodies, which have two arms that bind to the same molecule,... Continue Reading →
Reading time- 4 minutes Sara Musetti The overwhelming majority of cancer “breakthroughs” that get reported on are expensive, state-of-the-art therapies that rely more and more on deeper and deeper knowledge of tumors. And those are extremely important therapies. However, these shiny discoveries tend to hide an interesting fact: our best cancer treatment is also our... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Manisit Das It is said that cancer is a great equalizer. Unfortunately, however, the same can’t be said about cancer care. Where you live, how much money you make, and the kind of health plan you have can determine if you will receive the care you need to manage your cancer... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Taylor B. Poston, Ph.D., M.P.H. Most tumors do not respond to T-cell based immunotherapies, but the explanation for this phenomenon has been unclear. Researchers have speculated that there could be insufficient priming of anti-tumor T cells, or if T cells are primed, they are unable to recognize and eradicate the tumor.... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Michael Marand For decades, cancer therapy has been dominated by surgical resection, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. But each of these methods comes with its limitations. Surgery fails when there are scattered, small bits of tumor that escape to other areas of the body, called metastases. Radiation therapy fails when said metastases... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Jessica Desamero From the start, our mission here at OncoBites has been to share the complicated nature of cancer with our readers and to shed light on breakthroughs in understanding and treating the disease. One of our biggest messages has been that “cancer” is really a family of different but related... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Taylor A. Johnson Here at OncoBites, we have covered multiple advancements in the imaging and diagnosis of cancer. These have included isotonic labeling to detect the cancer progression, liquid biopsies for uncovering tumor profiles, and even artificial intelligence for interpreting images. In addition, several aspects of breast cancer, ranging from new... Continue Reading →
When patients volunteer to participate in a clinical trial, their voices should be heard. Reading time: 7 minutes Patty Spears A recent study (Nyrop et. al. 2019) looked at how clinicians and patients reported numbness and tingling in the patient’s hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy) after getting chemotherapy for breast cancer. They call this chemotherapy... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Kedar Puvar At first glance, mushrooms, being immobile and nutritious, seem to be rather unassuming. Why, then, would you want to turn to mushrooms of all things as a source of new medicines? It turns out that they make up for their evolutionary weaknesses with a powerful toolbox of molecular defenses... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Rachel Cherney Early cancer detection is critical for increasing patient survivability; however, current methods for early detection are costly and often inaccurate. It is of great importance to find other, more cost effective and accurate methods for early cancer detection, and to do this, we may need to turn to new... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Ariana Cardillo If you’ve been to the Midwest, it’s hard to miss the endless fields dedicated to the agriculture industry. If you live there, you are accustomed to the growing cycles and crop rotations of the fields. You probably are even desensitized to the massive machinery used to maintain these crops.... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Varshit Dusad A cancer diagnosis is generally perceived to be a death sentence. With millions of people dying of cancer every year, this does not seem to be at all outrageous. However, researchers all over the world, in academia and industry alike, have been relentlessly pursuing novel therapies and drugs to... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 6 minutes Nisitha Sengottuvel So far, a lot of the articles we have been discussing here on Oncobites have been revolving around bench research regarding cancer biology and therapeutics. On the public health side of cancer care, there are a lot of emerging fields: one of which investigates the economic burden of cancer... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Sara Musetti The world of drug discovery is a frustrating, delicate world. Scientists spend years working on fine-tuning molecules to improve their function, make them safer, or even just make them easier to give to patients. We have a catalog of drugs that work on single, specific proteins only found in... 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 Sara Musetti Picture this: You walk into a strange room. Maybe you’re at a friend’s house, or the restroom in a new coffee shop, or a hotel room. It’s dark, and you can’t see, but no matter where you put your hand, you just can’t find the light switch. You know... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Manisit Das In the past, we have discussed checkpoint inhibitors - therapies that block communication between cancer and immune cells, preventing cancer cells from evading the immune system. Dr. James Allison and Dr. Tasuku Honjo, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2018 for their pioneering work in cancer immunotherapy... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes You may have heard of the infamous thalidomide, a morning sickness drug that was patented in the 1950s. Its potent anti-nausea effects made it ideal as a remedy for morning sickness in pregnant women and thalidomide was sold in over 40 countries, going as far as to be made available over... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Bekah Schulz Natural products, or compounds isolated from plants/microorganisms, have been used as herbal medicines throughout human history. These compounds have many measurable effects. In fact, ⅓ of the top selling pharmaceuticals are natural products or their derivatives. Many antibiotics were discovered from screening these compounds and recently have shown efficacy... Continue Reading →
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