NanomedicineCenter.com

Effective treatment for prostate cancer in sight

Scientists at the University of Sydney in Australia have reported that they have discovered the possible role of an enzyme called cPLA2- in prostate cancer and its potential to be a treatment target for prostate cancers that no longer respond to hormone-related therapy.

Hormone-related therapy is the first thing that’s done on patients with advanced prostate cancers because prostate cancer cells usually rely on male hormones to grow. Some prostate cancers become insensitive to hormone-related therapy after initially responding to it.

It’s important to say that the intake of omega-6 fatty acids have drastically increased, opposite to omega-3 fatty acids. What happens is that dietary omega-6 fatty acids end up in our cells where they are released by the enzyme cPLA2- and converted into inflammatory chemicals. Inflammatory chemicals can contribute to the development and progression of prostate cancer due to their roles in promoting cell and blood vessel growth.
That’s why scientists from Sydney have said that by blocking cPLA2- activity could have a therapeutic effect in treating advanced prostate cancer.

“cPLA2- is found in all prostate cancer cells. Not only is cPLA2- increased in hormone-insensitive cells; inhibition of cPLA2- results in a significant reduction in prostate cancer cell numbers, due to reduced proliferation (cell growth) and increased apoptosis (cell death),” said Dr Qihan Dong, the leading author.

Source: usyd.edu.au

Soft-tissue sarcoma exposed

Scientists at the UC Davis Cancer Center have reported that they have exposed a very rare type of cancer — soft-tissue sarcoma, which is deadly for some patients. It’s been shown that exploring the cancer thoroughly — knowing its size, site, grade and depth is of huge importance for doctors to be able to determine the treatment procedure.

“Soft-tissue sarcomas have been lumped together in the past because they are rare, yet they are still a very heterogeneous group of diseases,” said Robert Canter, who led the research. “Our work shows that in order to improve outcomes we need to think of and treat sarcomas as distinct rather than as just one disease.”

In order to gather as much valuable data as possible, scientists followed over two thousand patients with low-grade soft-tissue sarcoma. They have come to the conclusion that the most prominent patterns of recurrence and death were predicted by tumor site. Patients with small tumors located in an extremity and easily removed with surgery experienced longer term survival. About nine percent of patients, usually those with large tumors in the abdomen, had the worst outcomes, sometimes with recurrences many years after the initial operation.
“The large number of patients in our study made it possible for us to look at the small percentage of patients with low-grade sarcoma who didn’t do very well,” said Canter. “We clearly need to develop more aggressive treatment and long-term follow-up options for patients with certain types of sarcomas.”

After that, scientists did a second study. They followed around 200 patients with an aggressive form of soft-tissue sarcoma, and they’ve constructed a tool that can be used to predict three- to five-year survival based on pre-operative variables.
“Tumor size has consistently been considered a predictor of worse survival, but tumor size alone is not enough to determine the best treatment protocol for every patient. The tool we devised takes into account additional risk factors,” said Canter.

These studies will be the base for future research of soft-tissue sarcomas.

The studies were published in Annals of Surgical Oncology and Clinical Cancer Research, respectively. The whole project was funded by the National Institute of Health.

Source: ucdmc.ucdavis.edu

Cancer vaccine based on sugar on the way

Carcinomas, types of cancer which include prostate, lung, ovarian and breast cancer, among others, will be treatable and curable by a new vaccine which is based on molecules of sugar residing on the surface of cancer cells. Scientists from Moores Cancer Center at the University of California are set to develop a new kind of immunotherapy primarily for prostate cancer, but applicable for other types of cancer.

The leader of the research team, Alessandra Franco, MD, PhD, along with her co-workers spent the last 10 years proving that T-cells (“killer”) can recognize sugars on tumor cell surfaces. Her team pioneered and developed the notion that conventional T-cells recognize not only peptides, or pieces of proteins, but also sugars, specifically small carbohydrates called tumor-associated carbohydrate antigens (TACA) expressed on carcinoma cell surfaces. Ideally, this recognition enables the T-cell to attach to and kill the cancer cell.
The scientists have designed “glycopeptides,” compounds in which sugars are linked to peptides that are recognized by T-cells. When given as part of a vaccine therapy, these glycopeptides rouse immune system T-cells into recognizing TACA on tumor cell surfaces, attacking and killing the cancer cells.

There are numerous immunotherapies for cancer in this moment of time, but they are all focused on making antibodies recognize proteins on tumor cells.
“A limitation with current immunotherapies is that every tumor expresses different protein antigens, which all need to be characterized,” said Franco. “It is difficult for the immune system to discriminate, to tell that cancer cells are ‘non-self’ and should be destroyed. What’s nice about T-cells recognizing sugars and why it’s so important in cancer is because the same molecules are uniquely expressed in a large variety of cancers.”

The research is supposed to last two years. In the first year, the team plans to gather as much laboratory data as possible. In the second year, the clinical trials should begin.
“The beauty of this approach is that the same vaccine may prevent metastasis,” she said, noting that tumor cells can use sugar or carbohydrate antigens to spread. “If ultimately proven successful, this could be used in a first attempt to try to address vaccination on a large scale to prevent cancer.”

The whole project is funded by Gateway for Cancer Research from Illinois.

Source: cancer.ucsd.edu