Word: tumors
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With a disease as complex as cancer, it's easy to forget that sometimes the most effective defense can be the simplest. Despite all the gadgets that modern medicine has to image, diagnose and track a tumor, there is an easier way to go about things. Researchers at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference in Chicago reported earlier this month that the best way to figure out how a cancer is progressing is to draw a little blood...
Tracking cancer via the blood certainly isn't new. Just as a pregnancy test can detect the proteins of a 10-day-old fetus in the mother's circulatory system, similar tests can detect proteins on cancer cells released by a tumor that is itself only dozens of cells large. Most of these migrating cells die during the journey. Others are more menacing--pioneers programmed to seed new growth in distant tissues. Either way, as epithelial cells--closely packed, multilayered cells of which most solid tumors are made--they are oddballs in their new fluid environment. "It's like splitting...
...those tests take you only so far. Suppose you could do more than just collect the enemy cells. Suppose you could interrogate them for information. That's what the new tests make possible. Researchers are starting to identify, for example, proteins on the surface of tumor cells that might signal a faster-growing, more aggressive type of cancer. Other protein signatures may hint at a more advanced tumor that is poised to metastasize. Both can help doctors craft more personalized therapies that match the right treatments to the right patients at the right time, improving effectiveness, lowering the costs...
...look at tumors for changes at the DNA, RNA and protein levels," says Dr. Gordon Mills, chair of systems biology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "It certainly gives us a way of looking at what is happening inside a tumor, and that's very exciting...
...show did not reveal itself as a hoax until near the end. Three candidates, each desperately needing a kidney transplant to remain alive, tried to convince a woman dying of a brain tumor why they should be the lucky recipient of one of her kidneys...