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DALLAS - Walking is just fine with 58-year-old Mary Cecil, who used to be an avid runner. "I was running and I started feeling pain in my left leg, and it was also tender when I slept on that side," she said. Cecil suspected a shin splint or pulled muscle. A bone scan, however, revealed a rare and aggressive tumor called dedifferentiated chondrosarcoma. The bone cancer is virtually unstudied. According to limited information, only one in 10 diagnosed with it survive two years. "Very scary," recalled Cecil of how she felt upon learning of the diagnosis. "The world just turned...

Dr. Judah Folkman, a path-breaking cancer researcher who faced years of skepticism before his ideas led to successful treatments, died Monday in Denver. He was 74. .... Dr. Folkman, a professor at Harvard and director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston, is considered the father of the idea that tumors can be kept in check by choking off the supply of blood they need to grow. The approach is now embodied in several successful cancer drugs, most notably Avastin, by Genentech. “His vision and ideas literally changed the course of modern medicine,” said Dr. William Li, a...

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) researchers led by Daniel Nolan and Assistant Professor Vivek Mittal have found that bone marrow (BM) derived endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) play a critical role in the early stages of tumor progression and that eliminating EPCs stops cancer growth. Using sophisticated high-resolution microscopy and flow cytometry, they zeroed in on the earliest stages of cancer progression and identified the role of EPCs in generating blood vessels that allow cancers to grow. "If we selectively blocked the EPCs, tumors were unable to make blood vessels and could not sustain their own growth," said Vivek Mittal, CSHL...

Growth of new blood vessels was seen 3-6 months after stem cells were injected into the heart. HE IS the only person so far to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval to undertake clinical trials for treating heart patients by directly injecting adult stem cells into the heart. The stem cells are derived from the bone marrow. And the person who enjoys this distinction is Dr. Amit N. Patel, Director of the Center for Cardiac Cell Therapy, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Others who have got an FDA approval to treat heart patients using adult stem cells...

Doctors Coax Man's Body to Grow New Brain WASHINGTON, D.C. - An experiment at the National Institutes of Health marks the first attempt to get the body to grow its own brain replacement. It's called Cognitive Angiogenesis, a field that has no less ambitious a goal than to eliminate idiocy as we know it. "No matter what you teach some people," explained Dr. Ryan Winge of NIH, "They are still functionally 'ignorant'. While this has been attributed to laziness or poor teaching, we now know that more often than not, the subject simply has a poorly formed brain. Terry is...