A new test can help to improve the clinical management of women who screen positive for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in routine cervical cancer screening, an NCI-led study has shown. The test, called p16/Ki-67 dual stain, more accurately predicted whether an HPV-positive woman would go on to develop cervical precancer within 5 yearsExit Disclaimer, compared to a Pap test—the current standard for managing HPV-positive women. As HPV testing becomes more central to cervical cancer screening, “the challenge is how to best manage, or triage, HPV-positive women,” said senior investigator Nicolas Wentzensen, M.D., Ph.D., of NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG). Dual stain testing…
Author: Brett Johnson
A new study has found that a test that measures genomic changes in tissue samples taken from the thyroid can help identify which patients likely need diagnostic surgery for thyroid cancer and which do not. When a suspicious small growth or lump (called a nodule) is found in the thyroid, doctors perform a fine-needle biopsy so that the cells can be examined by a pathologist. But up to one-third of the time, pathologists can’t determine from the appearance of the cells whether the nodule is cancerous (an indeterminate result), explained the study’s lead investigator, Yuri Nikiforov, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.…
The human body normally runs like a well-oiled machine. It is able to activate muscles and run repairs without a conscious thought. One of the truly fascinating components of the human body is the immune system. The immune system is able to identify potentially harmful foreign matter and destroy it. The immune system keeps the body healthy and safe. Because of this quiet but significant work, many researchers over the past thirty years have been asking how the immune system can work to combat cancer. What they have found has very recently come to epitomize what is often referred to…
Researchers have taken the first steps toward developing a vaccine to prevent cancer in people with Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that elevates a person’s risk of colorectal, endometrial, and other types of cancer. The scientists, led by Steven Lipkin, M.D., Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine, reported results from NCI-funded tests of a cancer prevention vaccine at a recent meeting. The vaccine prevented the growth of colorectal tumors in a mouse model of Lynch syndrome and prolonged the mice’s survival compared with unvaccinated mice. “The simplicity of this approach means that it is promising to take forward” to a human vaccine, Dr. Lipkin said during a press briefing April…
After decades of trying, in 2013 scientists developed a breakthrough drug that targets one of the most hard-to-hit cancer-related proteins, called KRAS. Now results on the first KRAS inhibitor to enter a clinical trial have been released and, so far, look promising. The experimental drug, AMG 510, specifically targets a mutated form of KRAS called G12C. About a third of all cancers are driven by harmful mutations in the RAS family of genes. The KRAS G12C mutation is found in approximately 13% of people with lung cancer, 3% of those with colorectal cancer, and 1% to 3% of people with other solid tumors. That translates to tens of thousands of…
Treatment with the targeted drug gilteritinib (Xospata) can improve survival compared with chemotherapy for some people with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), new results from a large clinical trial show. All participants enrolled in the trial had AML with specific mutations in the FLT3 gene that had come back after prior treatment (relapsed) or had not responded to treatment (refractory disease). Gilteritinib treatment increased median overall survival by close to 4 months compared with standard chemotherapy. Participants who received gilteritinib also had higher rates of complete remission and fewer serious side effects than those who received chemotherapy. The findings were published October 31 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In November 2018, the Food…
In children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), radiation therapy to prevent the cancer from returning in the brain is likely unnecessary, according to a new study. Radiation can even be omitted for children at the highest risk of the cancer coming back, the study showed. Over the 10-year course of the clinical trial, only 8 out of the 598 children in the study had a relapse that involved their central nervous system (CNS). Six of the 8 children were successfully treated with additional therapies and were still alive at the time of the study’s publication. “Given the long-term risks of CNS radiation therapy, particularly…
In what could be a major breakthrough, scientists at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea claim to have identified the cellular origin of glioblastoma, a fast-growing type of central nervous system tumor that forms from supportive tissue of the brain and spinal cord. It is widely-regarded as one of the deadliest and most aggressive and tenacious forms of cancer. According to the published KAIST study, the starting point for glioblastoma is neural stem cells containing mutation drivers that are actually separate from the tumor mass. This answers the question of why glioblastomas almost always grow…