A blood test can tell people if they’ve won their battle with cancer or not. A new study shows that liquid biopsies—which use gene-sequencing to scan a blood sample for DNA, rather than analyzing a chunk of excised tissue—can categorize cancer survivors as very likely cured or at a big risk for a relapse.
Micromedic Technologies Ltd.'s (TASE:MCTC) share price skyrocketed over 75% today, after the company reported positive results in a trial of its prostate cancer diagnosis solution from a urine sample using the CellDetect technology developed by its Zetiq Technologies subsidiary .
The trial results showed that when the CellDetect technology was used to diagnose samples from 18 patients and healthy subjects, both groups were accurately diagnosed.
The company believes that development of this non-invasive test is likely to improve diagnosis of prostate cancer, avoid unnecessary biopsies, and save the health system hundreds of thousands of costly tests.
With the big cancer confab ASCO 2016 fading into memory, R&D teams everywhere are getting back to work on their cancer programs – and across the industry many of them will be doing the same work, on the same targets, supporting the exploding supernova known as immuno-oncology.
The rapid expansion of this space in the past five years has been exceptional to witness: catalyzed by striking clinical data, reflecting real changes in the survival curves of an ever-broader set of cancers, a huge number of I/O programs have advanced across the industry, fueled by prodigious amounts of capital. This is in many ways great news for patients and the industry.
Moderna Therapeutics still hasn’t produced data in humans supporting its technology, which is meant to turn our bodies into little drugmaking factories. But the Cambridge, MA-based company nonetheless keeps grabbing the attention, and cash, of other drugmakers.
Scientists from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have successfully inhibited the growth of colon tumors in mice with mismatch repair deficiency. The research team, headed by the Center's director MYUNG Kyungjae, made the announcement in a manuscript published in the American Association for Cancer Research on June 6th. It is a significant breakthrough for the future treatment of colon cancer patients; specifically for those with DNA mismatch repair (MMR) deficient tumors.
The world’s largest DNA sequencing company says it will form a new company to develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise.
Illumina, based in San Diego, said its blood tests should reach the market by 2019, and would be offered through doctors’ offices or possibly a network of testing centers.
The spin-off’s name, Grail, reflects surging expectations around new types of DNA tests that might do more to defeat cancer than the more than $90 billion spent each year by doctors and hospitals on cancer drugs. Illumina CEO Jay Flatley says he hopes the tests could be a “turning point in the war on cancer.”
Animated Dynamics has closed $1.7 million in venture funding for a medical imaging technology developed to help doctors get a better view of the cancers that they’re treating.
No one illustrates the promise of cell therapy better than a little girl named Emily Whitehead. She was just 5 years old when she got sick with a common type of childhood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Roughly 98 percent of children go into remission within weeks of treatment, but Emily relapsed repeatedly despite several rounds of chemotherapy.
In a meta-analysis of hundreds of clinical trials involving thousands of patients, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that therapeutic approaches using precision medicine, which emphasizes the use of individual genetics to refine cancer treatment, showed improved response and longer periods of disease remission, even in phase I trials.
The findings are published in the June 6, 2016 issue of JAMA Oncology.
In the world of cancer treatment, early diagnosis can mean the difference between being cured and being handed a death sentence. At the very least, catching a tumor early increases a patient’s chances of living longer.
Researchers at Microsoft think they may know of a tool that could help detect cancers before you even think to go to a doctor: your search engine.
