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Tom Telford ’s stomach ached. The New York City teacher had been drinking cup after cup of coffee as he labored to finish year-end grading and coach his high-school baseball team through the playoffs. He worried he might have an ulcer. When school let out, though, Mr. Telford looked forward to relaxing on a 25th anniversary cruise with his wife. But once in the Caribbean, he struggled to swim and climbing from one deck to another exhausted him. Back at home, he collapsed while running a TV cable in his bedroom. His family doctor told him he had lost two...

A Rutgers nutritional scientist and two cancer biologists at New York City’s Hunter College have found that an ingredient in extra-virgin olive oil kills a variety of human cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The ingredient is oleocanthal, a compound that ruptures a part of the cancerous cell, releasing enzymes that cause cell death. Paul Breslin, professor of nutritional sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, and David Foster and Onica LeGendre of Hunter College, report that oleocanthal kills cancerous cells in the laboratory by rupturing vesicles that store the cell’s waste. The findings are published in Molecular...

Vitamin D can slow down or even reverse the initial prostate cancer or tumours without the requirement for surgery or radiation, says new research. While the researchers are not sure at this stage about the connection, they said vitamin D can at least slow down the multiplying nature of the tumour, which is crucial in initial stage prostate cancer. In many cases when the biopsy is taken, it requires 60 days for the inflammation from the biopsy to subside for an operation and during this supplements of vitamin D would be helpful, while under active surveillance, said researchers. “We do...

San Diego-based Aethlon Medical Inc., a company developing targeted therapeutic devices to address infectious diseases and cancer, announced that its majority-owned subsidiary Exosome Sciences Inc. has entered into a research collaboration with Thomas Jefferson University, which is in Philadelphia. The goal of the collaboration is to advance a "liquid biopsy" that could improve the diagnoses and monitoring of head and neck cancer. In this regard, researchers will seek to determine whether exosome-based molecular signatures correlate with and predict patient responses to therapy. Aethlon Medical’s lead product is the Aethlon Hemopurifier, a therapeutic device that selectively targets the rapid elimination of...

In breakthrough, researchers in Technion lab of Nobel laureate Aaron Ciechanover discover proteins that affect cancerous cells’ growth and development team of Israeli researchers at the Technion has discovered two proteins that can suppress cancer and control the cells’ growth and development. The study was conducted in the laboratory of Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, an Israeli Nobel-prize winner in chemistry, and led by Dr. Yelena Kravtsova-Ivantsiv. The team included research students and physicians from the Rambam, Carmel and Hadassah Medical Centers. In a paper published in the journal Cell last week, the researchers showed how the proteins could repress cancerous tissues...

IBM's supercomputer Watson will be used to make decisions about cancer care in 14 hospitals in the US and Canada, it has been announced. Using computers to trawl through vast amounts of medical data speeds up the diagnosis process. (excerpt) It also recently teamed up with IBM to allow the software that helps gather health data from iPhones to be used by Watson.

Nell Barrie, a spokeswoman for Cancer Research UK, while calling the results "encouraging" and "promising," told CNN that much remains to be learned and the new drugs would not replace any of the existing cancer treatments. ... But Dr. James Larkin, the lead author of the melanoma study, called the results a game changer. "We've seen these drugs working in a wide range of cancers, and I think we are at the beginning of a new era in treating cancer," Barrie said immunotherapy could offer hope to people with cancers that are otherwise difficult to treat, such as melanoma, advanced...

More than 200,000 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year and almost 160,000 people will die from it.Now, a drug that is showing incredible results in treating lung cancer has doctors more hopeful than ever.Dr. Amita Patnaik says, "It truly is a transformative treatment." Those are not words Dr. Patnaik uses lightly, but a clinical trial for treating lung cancer with the drug Keytruda has shown remarkable results. "How have you been feeling?" she asks her patient.Abelardo Torres has gone from being wheelchair bound and on oxygen full time, to an almost full recovery. Before the trial...

Transcript: Against all odds, Elizabeth Marek is alive, she has a device that attacks brain cancer cells with electric fields to thank. Elizabeth has glioblastoma, a deadly and aggressive form of brain cancer with no cure and a life expectancy of just over two years. 26 weeks pregnant with her second child, 3 years after a small tumor was found in her brain, Elizabeth began suffering from extreme headaches. She thought it was migraines, but it wasn't. SOUNDBITE (English) ELIZABETH MAREK, BRAIN CANCER PATIENT, SAYING: "It ended up being a tumor that was the size of my fist on the...

Nearly everyone is thinking about cancer these days thanks to the Ken Burns film on PBS, “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.” All of us, including Mr. Burns himself, who as a child lost his mother to cancer, know a family member or a close friend who has died of the Killer C. The film tells us the magnitude of the murderous disease we are up against: “Cancer is a worldwide scourge. The fastest-growing disease on earth. By 2030, there will be as many as 22 million cases worldwide. Cancer afflicts 1.7 million Americans each year and kills 600,000 of...

We have the earth-shattering technology in our hands—but even its inventors worry about its awesome power to alter our genetic future. “We have within our grasp the technology to change evolution. This could change the course of biological life.” — Paul Berg, Nobel Laureate and a pioneer of genetic engineeringIn 2012, scientists in the U.S. and Sweden invented a technology as potentially life-altering as splitting the atom. One that you haven’t heard of—yet—called “CRISPR-Cas9”. This innovation with the cumbrous name allows biologists to edit DNA almost as easily as cutting and pasting words and letters on a laptop.Scientists say...

Scientists at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute and Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have combined their nanotechnology expertise to create a new treatment that may solve some of the problems of using chemotherapy to treat pancreatic cancer. The study, published online in the journal ACS Nano, describes successful experiments to combine two drugs within a specially designed mesoporous silica nanoparticle that looks like a glass bubble. The drugs work together to shrink human pancreas tumors in mice as successfully as the current standard treatment, but at one twelfth the dosage. This lower dosage could reduce both the cost of treatment and the...

Artificial sweeteners are typically used by people who want to enjoy the sweetness of sugar without the calories that come with it. However, new research suggests that a popular sugar substitute could be used to fight cancer as well as expanding waistlines.

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore said recently that she will propose a "Right to Try" bill in her state. But it's not the bill itself that gained national attention. Instead, it was Fiore's statement that she believes cancer is "a fungus" that can be cured by "flushing, let’s say, saltwater, sodium carbonate" through the body.

Abstract Here, we propose a new strategy for the treatment of early cancerous lesions and advanced metastatic disease, via the selective targeting of cancer stem cells (CSCs), a.k.a., tumor-initiating cells (TICs). We searched for a global phenotypic characteristic that was highly conserved among cancer stem cells, across multiple tumor types, to provide a mutation-independent approach to cancer therapy. This would allow us to target cancer stem cells, effectively treating cancer as a single disease of “stemness”, independently of the tumor tissue type. Using this approach, we identified a conserved phenotypic weak point – a strict dependence on mitochondrial biogenesis for...

Researchers from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute have made an exciting discovery for cancer patients everywhere. A chemical found in a rare plant from Australia has the ability to "eat" cancerous tumors and completely eradicate them within days. The tumor-eating chemical is found in the seeds of berries of the Blushwood plant. The chemical, which is being called EBC-46, takes three weeks to extract and the process is quite difficult. Experts are even saying that they still don't completely understand why the chemical is in the seed of the Blushwood berry in the first place. Farming Blushwood in large quantities...

A scientist at the University of Illinois, Dipanjan Pan, and his team say they may have found a way to stop cancer cell growth, according to a paper presented at the American Chemical Society conference this week. The work is in very early stages, but has shown success in stopping breast cancer and melanoma cell growth in lab tests. Pan's technique uses nanotechnology to deliver a synthesized element similar to the venom found in bees, snakes and scorpions.

When scientists injected spores of a weakened form of the bacterium Clostridium novyi directly into the soft-tissue tumors of dogs and that of a single human subject, the results were not only abscesses, fever and pain at the site--all inflammatory responses that showed the immune system had been drawn to the area. In a matter of hours, the bacterial spores quickly found their way into these tumors' necrotic cores and began replicating madly, in several cases killing the malignant tissue. In three of 16 dogs treated with the C. novyi, tumors disappeared altogether and the animals were cured. In three...

A scientist at the University of Illinois, Dipanjan Pan, and his team say they might have found a way to stop cancer cell growth, according to a paper presented at the American Chemical Society conference this week. The work is in very early stages, but has shown success in stopping breast cancer and melanoma cell growth in lab tests. Pan’s technique uses nanotechnology to deliver a synthesized element similar to the venom found in bees, snakes and scorpions. Ancient texts show doctors have used venom to treat aliments for years. In 14 BC, the Greek writer Pliny the Elder described...

“THERE is no treatment.” This is the conclusion of an Egyptian papyrus, written around 3000BC, that is the oldest known description of the scourge that is now called “cancer”. And so, more or less, it remained until the 20th century, for merely excising a tumour by surgery rarely eliminates it. Only when doctors worked out how to back up the surgeon’s knife with drugs and radiation did cancer begin to succumb to treatment—albeit, to start with, in a pretty crude fashion. Now, however, that crudeness is rapidly giving way to sophistication, as a new wave of cancer treatments comes to...