Cancer: Four-Stranded DNA Could Help Develop Targeted Treatments

By taking a closer look at four-stranded versions of DNA inside the genome of human cells, scientists have discovered some potential new avenues for targeted cancer treatments. They found that the quadruple helix structures occur in DNA regions that control genes, especially cancer genes.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, report their findings in the journal Nature Genetics.

Targeted cancer therapies are currently the focus of much research and development into new anticancer treatments.

They are an important area of precision medicine - where information about an individual patient's genes and proteins are used to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease.

Read more: Cancer: Four-Stranded DNA Could Help Develop Targeted Treatments

The aim of targeted therapy is to attack cancer cells without affecting healthy cells.

Source: MedicalNewsToday

Study Finds Potential New Biomarker For Cancer Patient Prognosis

To treat or not to treat? That is the question researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) hope to answer with a new advance that could help doctors and their cancer patients decide if a particular therapy would be worth pursuing.

Berkeley Lab researchers identified 14 genes regulating genome integrity that were consistently overexpressed in a wide variety of cancers. They then created a scoring system based upon the degree of gene overexpression. For several major types of cancer, including breast and lung cancers, the higher the score, the worse the prognosis. Perhaps more importantly, scores could accurately predict patient response to specific cancer treatments.

The researchers said the findings, to be published Wednesday, Aug. 31, in the journal Nature Communications, could lead to a new biomarker for the early stages of tumor development. The information obtained could help reduce the use of cancer treatments that have a low probability of helping.

Read more: Study Finds Potential New Biomarker For Cancer Patient Prognosis

The centromeres and kinetochores of a chromosome play critical roles during cell division. In mitosis,
microtubule spindle fibers attach to the kinetochores, pulling the chromatids apart. A breakdown in this
process causes chromosome …more

Source: medicalxpress

Vitamin D and Autism: The Missing Link

Causes, Prevention, and Treatment

I first became interested in vitamin D when I learned that it is not a vitamin. Instead, it is the only known substrate of a seco-steroid neuro-hormone that functions, like all steroids, by turning genes on and off.

That means it has as many different mechanisms of action as the genes it regulates. Moreover, vitamin D directly regulates hundreds, if not thousands, of the 21,000 coding genes of the human genome. Genes are responsible for making the proteins and enzymes the human body relies on for normal development and function.

Evidence that vitamin D is involved in the autism epidemic is mounting.

Read more: Vitamin D and Autism: The Missing Link

Source: naturalsolutionsmag

New gene testing method can identify mutations, prioritize variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes

A research team led by an award-winning genomicist at Western University has developed a new method for identifying mutations and prioritizing variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes, which will not only reduce the number of possible variants for doctors to investigate, but also increase the number of patients that are properly diagnosed.

These potentially game-changing technologies, developed by Peter Rogan, PhD, students and his collaborators from Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, reveal gene variants that were missed by conventional genetic testing.

Their method, described in BMC Medical Genomics, was first applied to 102 individuals at risk or with a diagnosis of inherited breast cancer. The team also studied 287 women with no known mutations for an article published in Human Mutation.

Rogan, Canada Research Chair in Genome Bioinformatics, says that 16 to 20 per cent of women in southwestern Ontario, who have their BRCA genes tested for breast and/or ovarian cancer risk, carry disease-causing gene variants that are well-understood by clinicians and genetic counselors. If a patient tests positive for an abnormal BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene and have never had breast cancer, there is a much higher-than-average risk of developing the deadly disease.

Read more: New gene testing method can identify mutations, prioritize variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes

Source: azonano