Those of us not blessed with a high-octane metabolism already know the battle with fat cells is a miserable trench-warfare slog through the produce aisle. But new research from Tel Aviv University gives us even more reason to be suspicious of those fat cells. Apparently, they are implicated in the transition that surface-level melanoma cells undergo when they metastasize. The… Read more »
The biodiversity of this planet is in peril; in fact some biologists state we’re in the midst of an extinction event. The fact of the matter is the number of species on this planet is decreasing so rapidly that soon, all that will be left are humans, our livestock, mosquitoes, cockroaches, a billion strains of viruses, and ornamental lawn grasses…. Read more »
Immunotherapy is helping cancer patients, including those with melanoma, to more successfully fight their diseases. However, a new study released in this month’s Cancer Discovery highlights the fact that a more personalized approach could be even more successful. Brief background… immunotherapy works by activating the body’s T cells to find and destroy cancer cells. Obviously, this only works if the T… Read more »
There has been a flurry of news reports regarding a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that claims scientists may have developed a vaccine that when used in conjunction with other cancer therapies increases the chances of melanoma survival rates. The researchers developed a so-called cancer vaccine and then decided to look at whether using a combination… Read more »
It seems like every other day, my Google News alert regarding melanoma research lights up with another advance using immunotherapy. This one comes from a team at UCLA who combined immunotherapy with an experimental sequence of nucleic acids that mimics a bacterial infection. The researchers provided 22 people who had inoperable or advanced metastasized melanoma an immunotherapy drug called pembrolizumab… Read more »
Being consistent with good eating habits, drinking those glasses of water, and exercising is supposed to be good for you (I wouldn’t know because I’m unable to do all three of those things consistently). But in melanoma treatment, consistency may not always be a good thing, at least according to recently published research. Combining various drug treatments has been at… Read more »
Been a little quiet on the blog as I have been slammed with work stuff and still trying to recover from whatever that second virus-head-cold thing was. It’s SXSW in Austin and the sleep deficit I’m carrying isn’t going to be wiped out anytime soon. But I did see an interesting story I wanted to share. Researchers at the University… Read more »
I got all alliterative on the title there… but I’m really excited to share a story I read about research that uses a compound treatment to target melanoma cells but spares the healthy skin cells. The research was led by two scientists working out of Penn State College of Medicine and was recently published in the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. As noted… Read more »
In my previous post, I talked about how nanoparticles can deliver a payload of chemotherapy drugs in a targeted way, bypassing the anything other than cancer cells. Well, there’s another very interesting line of research involving nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are small, but they’re still larger than most human cells. But they are the perfect size to infiltrate cancer cells, which are… Read more »
OK, so y’all know I’m a science nerd, right? And there’s some really interesting research being done with nanoparticles to treat cancer. But I was always a little hazy on how exactly all of that worked. How did the nanoparticles find and target only the cancer cells and leave the regular cells untouched? I came across an explanation and thought… Read more »