For many patients with advanced breast cancer, the cancer drug Herceptin (trastuzumab) has offered new hope when traditional cancer drugs failed to work, shrinking tumors and sending some patients into remission.

Now Dihua Yu, M.D., Ph.D., and her colleagues at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have uncovered a powerful new cancer-fighting property of Herceptin, an antibody-based drug that targets a protein on breast cancer cells called HER-2 (also called ErbB2). Th

Using an ancient Chinese folk remedy as a model, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have designed several new compounds that, in early testing, promise to be both safer and more effective in fighting malaria and some forms of cancer than the current “gold standard” drug treatments.

Scientists will announce their successful results in late August at the American Chemical Society’s annual summer meeting, held this year in Philadelphia. Some of the results also

Breast cancer tends to progress to nearby lymph nodes, but surgeons can find it difficult to determine what tissue to remove with the breast tumor and what to leave intact. National Cancer Institute researchers hope to change that.

“Our advance is that we have a non-invasive method that may minimize surgical trauma,” says the team’s leader, Martin Brechbiel, Ph.D. “At the least, surgeons can acquire a set of images and have a feel, a road map if you will, for what they need to do be

A new study sheds light on the response to infection in people with type 2 diabetes. These individuals develop diabetes associated with obesity. Findings from this study revealed that controlling a specific protein produced by the body, known as a cytokine, reduces the expression of other molecules and helps control inflammation. This is significant because many complications associated with diabetes trigger an inflammatory response. Right now, type 2 diabetes affects over 17 million people in the

A plant called roseroot grows wild in Norway. Roseroot helps improve memory and the immune system and stabilizes cholesterol levels, blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Roseroot has been used in folk medicine for more than 3000 years, and grows throughout Norway

(University of Trondheim) NTNU’s Plant Biocentre in the Department of Biology has analysed the plant’s essential oils and volatile compounds. A test of the plant’s cancer prevention properties is also planned. The Norwegi

Scientists have determined the precise molecular structure of a potential new target for treating prostate cancer, a disease driven in part by abnormal testosterone activity. The target is part of the androgen receptor, a protein essential for testosterone to function in human cells. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men.

The androgen receptor and testosterone – technically, 5-alpha dihydrotestosterone – each drive prostate cancer at different stages of the disease

Scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the National Institutes of Health, have created a database of information about a group of genes associated with multidrug resistance in cancerous tumors. The research, published in the August 24, 2004, issue of Cancer Cell*, details the gene expression of a 48-member family of proteins called ABC transporters. The NCI scientists identified associations between expression of individual ABC transporters in cancer cells and resistance to

Gene mutations are closely targeted — enhancing the immune response while avoiding cancer

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have begun unraveling the mystery of how B lymphocytes — key infection-fighting cells in the body — are able to create many different kinds of specialized antibodies through selective gene mutations, while being protected from random mutations that could give rise to cancers.

The findings, reported in the Aug. 26 issue of the journal Natu

An article published today in Journal of Biology shows that the phosphatidylserine receptor, previously thought to be critical for the recognition and engulfment of dying cells, is not in fact necessary for these processes at all. Instead, the researchers found that the receptor is involved in the differentiation of a wide range of tissues during embryogenesis. When cells undergo programmed cell death, they spill their normally hidden contents and their neighbours can thus recognise them as s

Diabetes is one of the major causes of vision loss and blindness in the UK. Now optometry researchers at Aston University’s new £10 million Academy of Life Sciences are to carry out a ground-breaking new study which will lead to a greater understanding of visual problems experienced by diabetics.

Their research, which is the first of its kind in the world, will measure the effects of the daily cycle of blood sugar levels on the vision of diabetic patients via detailed eye examination

Tangled strands of proteins called amyloid are found in the brain tissues of patients with a variety of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. One such protein is tau, now known to participate in tangle formation in Alzheimer’s patients. Another is alpha-synuclein, whose mutations cause Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. In a paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Psy

Temple University researcher seeking physiological evidence of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has found a link between creatine and metabolic energy. The findings, which hold promise for future CFS treatments, were published in a recent issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.

“We found that creatine affects mitochondria – the parts of the cells that produce energy for all biological functioning – in normal human subjects. Now that we have established this baseline evidence, we ar

Loss supports cilia’s role in the condition

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that many people with Bardet-Biedl syndrome (BBS), a rare, complex condition marked by an array of seemingly unconnected symptoms, including obesity, learning difficulties, eye problems and asthma, also have another, previously unreported problem: many of them can’t detect odors. Because people with the syndrome likely lose their sense of smell before or shortly after birth, it wouldn&#14

A University of Alberta study has verified that there is physical evidence for those who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), giving new weight to the often stigmatized and misdiagnosed disorder.

Research just published in the “International Journal of Psychophysiology” determined that, using independent criteria, CFS can be distinguished from depression–two disorders that share many of the same symptoms.

CFS is an often debilitating disorder, characterized by a c

Your knees take the brunt of the increased demands on your lower body in terms of the amount of muscle mass used and joint flexion when you compare walking to running. By a lot. Why? Because you’re human.

Though humans share a lot of qualities with other mammals, we are unique in terms of posture, locomotion and gait. (In fact, we’re among the only two-legged mammals who walk and run.) For instance, horses consume about the same amount of energy to cover a mile when running or walkin

The combination of ultraviolet (UV) light and certain coatings can lower — by 15 to 50 percent — the ability of some types of bacteria to stick to a glass surface and cause contamination or biofouling, Penn State environmental engineers have found.

Dr. Baikun Li, assistant professor of environmental engineering, Penn State Harrisburg, says “Ultraviolet light has been used for many years as an environmentally friendly route to water disinfection. However, these new results indica