Reading time: 3 minutes Alex S. Woodell A warm breeze whips by as you notice a peculiar set of clouds forming in the distance. These cumulus clouds are tall with bumpy protrusions that flatten out near the top to form a silhouette of a giant anvil. As condensation builds in these behemoths, the bright sunlight... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Varshit Dusad There is no denying that cancer is a genetic disease and genetics is hereditary. So is cancer hereditary as well? Unfortunately, the answer is yes! If your ancestors had cancer, you have a higher risk to get cancer than someone who does not have cancer in their family history... 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: 5 minutes Payal Yokota Chemotherapy (chemo) can be prescribed alone and in combination with other therapies such as surgery, radiation, and immunotherapies (ie. vaccines, checkpoint blockade, etc). Since its discovery, the chemo field has greatly advanced, both in its development and ability to treat cancers. While surgery and radiation act locally to remove... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Shaye Hagler For those of you whose lives have been impacted by cancer, you might have heard of the term “metastasis.” We call cancer metastatic when it breaks off from the initial tumor and travels to other organs. You might also have heard it being referred to before as “stage 4... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Sara Musetti Cancer immunotherapy has been a very hot topic here at OncoBites (because it’s a hot topic right now among cancer researchers too), but let me be super clear ⎯ it is COMPLICATED. Your immune system is balanced extremely delicately to avoid sending you into shock each time you are... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Manisit Das Pancreatic Cancer remains one of the few cancers against which we haven’t found a treatment that offers long-term benefit. Currently, less than one in ten patients will survive five years past the point of diagnosis. Like any other cancer, early diagnosis can improve treatment options and patient survivability. However,... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Kedar Puvar Diseases are typically caused by defective or malicious proteins. Traditionally, treatments for these diseases use a strategy of inhibition - use a small molecule that can block the offending protein from carrying out its function and thereby, bring things back to normal. But what if we went one step... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Kaye Alcedo Even before President Nixon’s declaration of the “war on cancer” in 1971, the journey towards a cure was nothing but a rollercoaster ride. Many promising cancer drugs are tested in human clinical trials but ultimately fail primarily because they demonstrate inadequate efficacy or safety, costing billions of dollars, increasing... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Bekah Schulz It is well accepted that exercise is beneficial for human health and boosts overall energy level. However, the questions remains: can exercise be used as a cancer therapy? Research is indicating that it can. Over the past 20 years, studies have demonstrated that exercise decreases the risk of recurrence... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 6 minutes Rachel Cherney Modern medicine has saved millions of lives, but with a little improvement, it could save even more. Our current medical practices rely on medical professionals reacting to a diagnosis, treating patients after they may be or already are ill. We are increasingly recognizing the necessity of being proactive in... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Alex S. Woodell Marathon runners are an interesting breed. In order to complete the grueling 26.2 mile circuit, they must push their mental and physical boundaries to the limit. Seasoned runners possess great strength, focus, resilience, and determination. Each of these qualities is a testament to the intense training schedules they... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Varshit Dusad Cancer by no stretch of the imagination is a rare disease. It affects a significant population worldwide, and every year millions of dollar are spent investigating the causes of cancer and searching for a potential cure. However, a rarely discussed topic is the adverse impact on the health of... 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: 3 minutes Sara Musetti One of the realities of cancer is that the primary tumor is rarely the cause of issues; usually, mortality and complications come from tumor cells spreading throughout the body and forming new tumors, a process called metastasis. For most cancers, the primary tumor can be surgically removed, but once... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Kedar Puvar Cancerous cells by definition are constantly growing and multiplying and therefore have devised ways to sustain that growth. If one wishes to create a brand new therapeutic against cancer, it’s necessary to identify molecular mechanisms that cancer cells use to grow, then attempt to shut down that mechanism with... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Manisit Das Previously at Oncobites, we discussed how small particles such as nanoparticles could be used for delivering drugs against cancer. The nanoparticles can carry the drugs to the tumor taking advantage of the leakiness of blood vessels running through the tumor. The leaky vessels allow the drug-carrying nanoparticles to enter... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Taylor A. Johnson February is Heart Month, wherein various organizations such as the American Heart Association and the National Institute of Health raise heart health awareness and promote practices that can lower heart disease or cardiovascular disease (CVD) development. CVD and cancer are unfortunately two of the primary causes of death... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Swetha Srinivasan Cancer therapies, like all other medicines, only make their way to patients after the completion of a lengthy process of extensive research studies involving animals and then people to make sure that the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks. These final research studies in people are commonly known... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 6 minutes Payal Yokota Despite the advent and access to a variety of targeted immunotherapy approaches, the current paradigm for solid tumors still remains if you can cut it out – you do! Depending on the grade of tumor and degree of metastasis, there’s a substantial risk of tumor resurgence. In those cases,... Continue Reading →
Taylor B. Poston Childhood acute leukemia is the most common pediatric cancer in the developed world. It accounts for one-third of all cases and affects 1 in 2000 children under the age of 15. More specifically, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common pediatric leukemia and case numbers have been increasing steadily at 1%... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Bekah Schulz Many people are excited about checkpoint inhibitors in cancer immunotherapy. In fact, the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for the development of two checkpoint inhibitors PD-1/L1 (Opdivo/Keytruda) and CTLA-4 (Yervoy). However, cancer immunotherapy is not a new concept. In fact, in 1986, recombinant interferon (IFN) alpha was... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 3 minutes Rachel Cherney At Oncobites, we write about current and cutting edge cancer research and how various lifestyles may affect cancer risk. However, we don’t often talk about the types of data that are generated from cancer research or how they can be used. Large informative data sets can be used to... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Alex S. Woodell Most of us have taken acetylsalicylic acid at some point in our lives. This popular drug was first brought to market in 1899 by Bayer who coined the brand name Aspirin. Aspirin belongs to a class of drugs known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) which are used to... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Varshit Dusad Studying the growth of the tumor is very important to devise an effective treatment against cancer. Often cancer tissues are buried deep inside the body and we need diagnostic methods that can tell us about their progression accurately without harming the body while not losing the accuracy. Therefore, invasive... 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 Shaye Hagler Last spring, Sara introduced some of the ways tumors avoid being killed by both our own bodies’ defenses and the various treatments we throw at them; if you’ve kept up since then, you’ve read a lot about cancer biology and a tumor’s ability to send out signals to other cells... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Swetha Srinivasan “Congratulations, you are cancer free!” Hearing these words from the oncologist must come as an overwhelming relief to patients, as surviving a cancer diagnosis is one of the hardest things a person can do over their lifetime. Yet, beating cancer changes a person profoundly, and for many, the end... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Sara Musetti If someone were to ask you whether biological sex is related to the risk of cancer, you would might say yes--cis men can suffer from prostate and testicular cancer while cis women may suffer from cervical and ovarian cancer (and are at higher risk of breast cancer). Those all... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 5 minutes Manisit Das As humans, we are naturally programmed to recognize patterns. They help us detect cues in our surroundings and aid our decision making. We associate camouflage patterns with battle dress, assortments of red and green with the holidays; these recognition events help us to put things in boxes in our... Continue Reading →
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