A new prostate cancer risk assessment test, developed by a UCSF team, gives patients and their doctors a better way of gauging long-term risks and pinpointing high risk cases.
According to UCSF study findings, published this week, the test proved accurate in predicting bone metastasis, prostate cancer-specific mortality, and all-cause mortality when localized prostate cancer is first diagnosed. The test is known as the UCSF Cancer of the Prostate Risk Assessment, or CAPRA.
Liver cancer is one of the most fatal human malignancies and the third most frequent cause of tumor-related death, about half a million people globally each year. The current methods used to monitor such high-risk groups include ultrasound scans and a test for the presence of a single protein in the blood called alpha-fetoprotein. It is a good indicator of advanced liver cancer, but less able to detect early disease.
Although many prognostic factors predicting survival and cancer recurrence in patients undergoing surgery for colorectal liver metastases are already identified, the effects of newly introduced technologies and new drugs in the treatment of these patients are still poorly studied because of the presence of many involved factors.
It has been shown that constitutively activated STAT3 is detected in many HCC cell lines and tissues. This suggests that STAT3 is a promising molecular target for HCC gene therapy. RNA interference (RNAi) is a post-transcriptional gene-silencing mechanism, in which the homologous RNA sequences could be introduced into cells that inhibit the expression of a particular gene through the introduction of short interfering RNAs(siRNA). There were a large number of confirmed reports that RNAi targeting oncogene could successfully inhibit the growth of tumor cells in vitro and in vivo.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine in collaboration with lead investigators at the University of Kentucky have identified a new target for the diagnosis and treatment of age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in older Americans.
Alcohol is sometimes seen as part and parcel of college life, but there are programs that can significantly reduce students' risky drinking, according to a series of studies in a special college drinking supplement of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
Programs that bring colleges and their surrounding neighborhoods together may help reduce off-campus drinking problems, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that an alcohol control program at Western Washington University that also involved the community -- including increased police patrols in neighborhoods subject to loud and sometimes dangerous college parties, combined with efforts to make off-campus students better neighborhood residents -- led to a decline in student heavy episodic drinking (also called "binge" drinking).
A novel bacterium that has been trapped more than three kilometres under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120 000 years, may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets.
SALT LAKE CITY, June 14, 2009 -- It was long believed that conception does not involve a meeting of equals. The egg is a relatively large, impressive biological factory compared with the tiny sperm, which delivers to the egg one copy of the father's genes. However, a new study from Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah reveals that the father's sperm delivers much more complex genetic material than previously thought. The findings could lead to a diagnostic test to help couples deal with infertility.
Aggressive, deadly and often misdiagnosed, inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is the most lethal form of primary breast cancer, often striking women in their prime and causing death within 18 to 24 months. Now, scientists from The Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center have identified a key gene—eIF4G1—that is overexpressed in the majority of cases of IBC, allowing cells to form highly mobile clusters that are responsible for the rapid metastasis that makes IBC such an effective killer.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine in collaboration with lead investigators at the University of Kentucky have identified a new target for the diagnosis and treatment of age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in older Americans.
Australian and New Zealand researchers have accelerated research into Multiple Sclerosis by discovering two new locations of genes which will help to unravel the causes of MS and other autoimmune disease.
Their findings will be published today in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics.
Palo Alto, CA—Cellulose is a fibrous molecule that makes up plant cell walls, gives plants shape and form and is a target of renewable, plant-based biofuels research. But how it forms, and thus how it can be modified to design energy-rich crops, is not well understood. Now a study led by researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology has discovered that the underlying protein network that provides the scaffolding for cell-wall structure is also the traffic cop for delivering the critical growth-promoting molecules where needed.
WHAT: Most vaccines that protect against viruses generate infection-fighting proteins called antibodies that either block infection or help eliminate the virus before it can cause disease. Attempts to create a vaccine that induces antibodies that prevent HIV infection or disease, however, have so far been unsuccessful. But several recent studies suggest promising new research directions for the development of an antibody-based HIV vaccine, according to John R.
FAIRBANKS, Alaska—It is a misinterpretation of the application of the bedrock of scientific naming with regard to the number of moose species that Kris Hundertmark, a University of Alaska Fairbanks wildlife geneticist at the Institute of Arctic Biology, seeks to correct.
The adoption of Carl Linnaeus' two-part, genus-species system of naming, called taxonomy, has been used for centuries on all described organisms on Earth and is considered one of the greatest triumphs in science.