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Researchers associated with SEngine Precision Medicine, a precision oncology company that matches patients to medicines based on their own tumor samples, have published a new case report showing a patient's remarkable response to an off-label therapy identified by its PARIS Test. Despite standard-of-care chemotherapy and two surgeries, the patient's low-grade serous ovarian cancer (LGSOC) was progressing and her prognosis was terminal. But by testing a range of therapies in organoids grown from the patient's own tumor sample, SEngine's PARIS Test identified as a top candidate ibrutinib, a BTK inhibitor approved only for certain leukemias and lymphomas and with no prior...

PTEN is shown in its active (above) and inactive (below) forms. Genetic mutations aren't the only thing that can keep a protein called PTEN from doing its tumor-suppressing job. Johns Hopkins researchers have now discovered that four small chemical tags attached (reversibly) to the protein's tail can have the same effect, and they say their finding may offer a novel path for drug design to keep PTEN working. In a report published on July 9 in the journal eLife, the Johns Hopkins scientists describe how a cluster of four phosphate groups, first found 13 years ago to bind to PTEN's...

Enlarge Image Harold Varmus Credit: National Cancer Institute It may be dealing with the worst budget crunch in its history, but that is not stopping the National Cancer Institute (NCI) from doing new things. Today, NCI officials outlined a plan to bring together the agency's contract lab in Frederick, Maryland, and outside researchers to find ways to block a mutated protein that drives growth in one-third of all cancers but was thought impossible to "drug" until now. The RAS project, as NCI is calling it, will not entail huge amounts of money—just $10 million that will be reprogrammed from...

Turning Stem Cells Taken From Fat Tissue Into Personalized, Cancer-targeted Therapeutics Researchers in Slovakia have been able to derive mesenchymal stem cells from human adipose, or fat, tissue and engineer them into "suicide genes" that seek out and destroy tumors like tiny homing missiles. This gene therapy approach is a novel way to attack small tumor metastases that evade current detection techniques and treatments, the researchers conclude in the July 1 issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "These fat-derived stem cells could be exploited for personalized cell-based therapeutics," said the study's lead investigator,...

ASSOCIATED PRESS ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School are part of a team that has discovered a possible cause of prostate cancer, a finding they say could result in better forms of treatment or possibly a cure. The findings show a recurring pattern of scrambled chromosomes that leads to the merging of specific genes. The activity occurs only in prostate cancer. The Michigan researchers, with researchers at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, found the abnormality in the majority of prostate cancer tissue samples they analyzed. The gene fusion was...