Word: tumor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...next day—Sunday—Reuters reported that George Harrison was dying of a brain tumor. The tabloids had said it many times before, and George had denied it, but this was Reuters. Thinking only of how Freddie Mercury finally admitted he had AIDS the day before he died, I was convinced that the quiet Beatle had one foot in the grave. He had dodged throat cancer and a lunatic’s knife, but at 58, he had finally lost his battle with cancer...
SEEDY SOLUTION Flaxseed, a staple of the preindustrial diet, may help prevent a scourge of modern man: prostate cancer. Three rounded tablespoons of the ground grain a day, combined with a low-fat diet, reduced expected tumor growth and lowered levels of hormones and other markers associated with a problem prostate. Flaxseed is high in fiber and omega-3 fatty acids, both of which have been shown to protect against cancer...
...turns out, may be to put aside 99% of the immune system and focus on dendritic cells, a tiny but especially sensitive population of white blood cells that act as sentries to warn against invaders of all kinds. Scientists at California-based Cell Genesys, for example, have taken tumor cells from a number of cancers, genetically engineered them to pump out a hormone that stimulates production of a host of immune cells, and vaccinated late-stage lung-cancer patients with the mixture to boost chances that dendritic cells would sound the alarm against the tumors. In the latest study, three...
Researchers at Stanford University have harvested dendritic cells from advanced-cancer patients, exposed the cells to potent growth factors, added tumor-specific proteins to sensitize them and reintroduced the mixture into patients as a vaccine. Of 12 patients with advanced colorectal and lung cancer, two watched their tumors shrivel away, and another is still tumor free a year after receiving the vaccine...
Eventually, the goal is to detect precisely which molecular processes have gone wrong in an individual patient's cancer. Rather than being identified as lung cancer or breast cancer or kidney cancer, tumors will be tagged as EGFR positive, for example, or COX-2 positive. "The dream," says M.D. Anderson's Mendelsohn, "is that if Mrs. Smith gets a breast biopsy, we'll be able to say, 'Here are the four genes that are abnormal in her tumor,' pull open a drawer, pick out the antibodies or small molecules designed against the abnormal products of those genes, and give...