Tomato Genes Produce Promising Results Against Brain Tumours

Tomato genes could be used as a future treatment in gene therapy, according to new research results from Lund University.

Jure Piskur is a Professor at the Department of Biology, Lund University. Together with colleagues from Stockholm, Copenhagen and Lund, he has recently published research results on a tomato gene that it seems could be of value in future treatment of brain tumours. The results are reported in the journal Neuro-Oncology.

Research on gene therapy has been underway for a long time and last autumn the first gene therapy treatment was launched onto the market, by Ark Therapeutics from Kuopio in Finland.

The idea of gene therapy is to introduce an alien gene into a patient’s cancer cells. In combination with a specific drug, the introduced gene can cause the cancer cells to die. The tumour does not disappear, but the hope is that the disease can be halted for a couple of years. Read more

New Insights Into Deadly Brain Cancer

New findings by researchers at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center suggest that the most common form of malignant brain cancer in adults, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is probably not a single disease but a set of diseases, each with a distinct underlying molecular disease process. The study, published by Cell Press in the January issue of the journal Cancer Cell, provides a solid framework for investigation of future targeted therapies that may improve the near uniformly fatal prognosis of this devastating cancer.

“Previous work has established that gene expression profiling can be used to identify distinct subgroups of GBM,” says senior study author, Dr. D. Neil Hayes from the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “However, the exact number and clinical significance of these was unclear.” Dr. Hayes and colleagues at UNC Lineberger expanded on previous GBM classification studies and used expression profiling techniques to comprehensively analyze hundreds of GBM patient samples. The group was able to reliably identify four distinct molecular subtypes of GBM tumors.

The researchers then went on to perform a unique integrative analyses across multiple platforms to look for defining characteristics associated with each subtype. Their findings were quite striking, implying that there are distinct types of GBM and that each one is associated with a specific molecular process. “We discovered a bundle of events that unequivocally occur almost exclusively within a subtype,” explains Dr. Hayes.

The researchers also report that the nature of these events indicate that the underlying disease process for each subtype may involve distinct cells of origin at a specific stage of differentiation. This is finding has potential clinical significance as determining the cells of origin of GBM is critical for establishing effective treatment regimens. Clearly, given this new information, it makes sense that some drug classes would be expected to work for some tumor subtypes and not other. In support of this conclusion, Dr. Hayes’s group found that response to aggressive chemotherapy and radiation differed by subtype. Read more

No Change In Brain Tumor Incidence During A Time When Cell Phone Usage Increased

There was no substantial change in brain tumor incidence among adults 5 to 10 years after cell phone usage sharply increased, according to a new brief communication published online December 3 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Although cell phone use has been proposed as a risk factor for brain tumors, a biological mechanism to explain this association is not known.

Isabelle Deltour, Ph.D., of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Society, in Copenhagen, and colleagues analyzed annual incidence rates of glioma and meningioma among adults aged 20-79 years from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Researchers identified 60,000 patients who were diagnosed with these types of brain tumors between 1974 and 2003.

The researchers found that incidence rates over this 30 year-period were stable, decreased, or continued a gradual increase that started before the introduction of cell phones. They also found no change in incidence trends in brain tumors from 1998 to 2003. The authors say this finding may be due to one of several reasons: that the induction period relating cell phone use to brain tumors exceeds 5-10 years; that the increased risk in this population is too small to be observed; that the increased risk is restricted to subgroups of brain tumors or cell phone users; or that there is no increased risk. Read more

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