Reading time: 5 minutes Shaye Hagler The discovery of accelerators and brakes in our immune system in the early 1990s was fundamental to designing the cancer immunotherapy platforms we use today, which is why it won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology. Now, immune checkpoint inhibitors like anti-PD-1 can work in tandem with... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 minutes Jason Tetro Imagine a world in which cancer is no longer a threat to the world. Naturally, the task sounds unachievable. But much like Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force team, the Australian government has accepted this mission in the hopes of eliminating cervical cancer from the country. Now, a... 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 →
Reading time: 6 minutes Manisit Das Sometimes double agents can be critical players in changing the course of conflicts, wars, and history. If you are a Potterhead like me, you are probably aware of how Professor Severus Snape played an important role in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. He instigated many of the major... Continue Reading →
Reading time: 4 mins Sara Musetti “I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace.” This line, from John Green’s bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars, hits hard. A young teenage survivor of cancer has had a widespread relapse picked up in one of his many routine scans since going into remission years earlier.... Continue Reading →
Taylor B. Poston Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted bacterial infection in the world, and 75% of infected women never develop symptoms. Furthermore, chlamydia will ascend from the cervix to the upper genital tract in 40% of infected women. This infection of the endometrium puts women at risk for pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility.... Continue Reading →
Tamara Vital We’ve talked at Oncobites about how many factors can cause or contribute to cancer. We’ve discussed how tumors arise from cells that have acquired mutations (could be inherited). Many of these factors have been related to external exposures like UV exposure from the sun or cigarette smoking that cause mutations that contribute to... Continue Reading →
Kaye Alcedo Time is of the essence when it comes to the battle with cancer. Detecting tumors at an early stage increases the chance of patient survival to more than 80%. However, despite today’s advancing technology, about 48% of patients get diagnosed at a very late stage. This is because screening methods of many, if... Continue Reading →
Varshit Dusad Imagine a dystopian world. Here, some citizens of an otherwise well-functioning state have gone rogue and are running an anti-national agenda. They are always plundering the natural resources meant to be evenly distributed among the population. They are quite cunning as they start slowly by deviating from the laws of their natural order... Continue Reading →
Rachel Cherney Cancer is a complex set of diseases, characterized by uncontrolled growth and metastasis, destroying important organs and bodily systems. It can occur in almost any part of the body, and in most cases, it is impossible to determine how or when it will develop, certain genetically linked cancers perhaps being an exception. Because... Continue Reading →
Taylor A. Johnson October is the official month of breast cancer awareness. Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer, especially in women. Last year alone, the American Cancer Society estimated over 300,000 new cases of breast cancer would develop in men and women, and over 41,000 would pass away from breast... Continue Reading →
Ananya Sen It has been widely proven that there is a correlation between weight and cancer. Being overweight increases the cancer risk 52-62% compared to people with a healthy weight because excess body fat causes an increase in hormones that promote tumor growth. This result begs the question- is there a link between diet and... 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 →
Sara Musetti and Manisit Das Early October is an exciting time of the year when people all over the world turn their eyes to Stockholm to see the winners of the Nobel Prize. Yesterday, James Allison and Tasuku Honjo jointly won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for their work discovering the function... Continue Reading →
Jason Tetro If you’ve ever traveled internationally, you know you need a passport. This document is your access pass to the world. What you might not know is that this rather plain looking document is filled with a variety of different checkpoints to ensure authenticity. Some passports have biometric chips, others have incorporated images only... Continue Reading →
Manisit Das In earlier OncoBites articles, we discussed how genetic testing is increasingly used to guide cancer management. Cancer arises due to changes in our DNA sequences that make up our genes, which we refer to as gene mutations. By analyzing the genetic signatures within the tumor, clinicians can make better-informed choices to streamline the... Continue Reading →
Sara Musetti When someone says the word “cancer.” it can tie knots in the guts of even the strongest among us. There is no pretending that cancer isn’t a terrifying phenomenon that has touched most of our lives. Very few cancers, however, are able to elicit the chill that brain cancer does, in patients, family... Continue Reading →
Varshit Dusad 'All models are wrong, some are useful!' - George Box The advancement of biological research relies on understanding how the different moving parts interact with each other, forming an integrated system. To better understand a system we often resort to models which help us develop a logical framework of these interactions, offering us... Continue Reading →
Yitong Li How to treat cancers has always been one of the biggest challenges in modern medical practice. While current chemotherapies and radiotherapies have shown significant progress, not all patients survive treatment, and only a portion of those who survive do so without suffering from significant trauma. Hence, early diagnosis and safer treatments are the... Continue Reading →
Nisitha Sengottuvel At OncoBites, we’ve talked about many facets of cancer, the many internal and external factors that can affect tumor growth, and the established and developing methods to detect and treat cancer. We’ve also begun to cover the many ways in which biomedical science falls short in effectively treating cancer. Being diagnosed with cancer... Continue Reading →
Kaye Alcedo Politics aside, we recently lost one of our public servants who dedicated more than 40 years of service to our country. Towards the end of his life, Senator John McCain suffered from glioblastoma, a very aggressive and malignant type of brain cancer. Currently, the standard treatment for glioblastoma relies on surgery, radiation, and... Continue Reading →
Alex S. Woodell As members of the biomedical research community, we are all familiar with the basic structure of the scientific method. We make an observation that identifies a problem, form a hypothesis based on known information, perform experiments to test this hypothesis, then draw conclusions that drive future research. However, there is a fifth... Continue Reading →
Rachel Cherney Most of us have been affected by cancer, whether we ourselves or someone we know has been diagnosed. It can be caused by various lifestyle habits, external or environmental factors, and genetics, and it’s extremely prevalent; as of 2015, 1 in 6 deaths worldwide was due to cancer. As described in a previous... Continue Reading →
Shaye Hagler At Oncobites, we’ve been talking a lot about the role of immunity in cancer. Understanding the immune system is vital to understanding both what drives cancer and what protects us against it. One of the biggest paradoxes in cancer research is that immune system activation is important in fighting cancer via a process... Continue Reading →
Jason Tetro What causes cancer? It’s a question that has been asked for millennia (Sudhakar, 2009) yet no concrete answer has been found. In the 4th Century BCE, Hippocrates believed the answer lied in the presence of “black bile,” which to him was one of the four major humors in the body. Over the centuries,... Continue Reading →
Varshit Dusad Methotrexate is one of the earliest drug discovered for treatment of cancer. It is listed by WHO as one of the essential medicines and has been used to treat various forms of cancer. Methotrexate has had such broad success across cancer subtypes due to its unique mechanism of action. Inside tumors, it attacks... Continue Reading →
Zina McSweeney The consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with worse colon cancer outcomes, according to research published by Brendon Guercio et al. on July 19th, 2018. Among 1,018 patients with stage III colon cancer, researchers found that replacing one 12-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) with an artificially-sweetened beverage (ASB) was estimated to lead to a... Continue Reading →
Manisit Das Not long ago Tamara mentioned in her OncoBites article that it is often hard to determine what factors drive cancer. Even after a mutation responsible for fueling cancer growth is identified, we do not always know how that mutation contributes to tumor formation. Understanding these mechanisms is however quite important. As we gain... Continue Reading →
Sara Musetti Last week on OncoBites, Beth Rogoski of PhDoodles shared with us the story of liquid biopsies, blood tests that can be used to detect cancer and evaluate treatments. Today, in a follow-up piece, we’ll go into more detail as to what technologies are making their way to market, how liquid biopsies can be... Continue Reading →
Beth Rogoyski Most would consider a blood test a bit of a pain in the arm, but except for the fantastically needle-phobic, generally not something that would keep you awake at night. Contrast that to the sentiments that spring to mind when you hear the word chemotherapy, and the two couldn’t seem more dissimilar. Despite... Continue Reading →
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