A major Chinese company is investing Israel’s Check-Cap, developer of a new technology to allow for non-invasive colon cancer screening that could save millions of lives. The company claims its little pill-like gadget avoids the extremely unpleasant laxative-enema colon “cleaning” process and the uncomfortable colonoscopy, too. The device is still in the testing stage, but if all this pans out, the hope is that many more people will go for a checkup that can catch deadly colon cancer before it’s too late.
Une étude coordonnée par Ugo Cavallaro, un chercheur du programme de Médecine Moléculaire de l'Institut Européen d'Oncologie moléculaire, a été publiée sur le journal en ligne Journal of Clinical Investigation. Elle ré-ouvre, après des années de silence, le chapitre sur les médicaments anticancéreux de type anti-angiogéniques, c'est à dire, qui visent à empêcher la formation de nouveaux vaisseaux sanguins qui alimentent la tumeur en favorisant sa croissance: bloquer l'angiogenèse revient donc à faire mourir de faim le cancer.
Screening for certain cancers could soon be as simple as a home pregnancy test. Sangeeta Bhatia, a professor at MIT, is working to replace costly and uncomfortable colonoscopies and MRIs with a dollop of yogurt and a urine test—a cheap method that could improve the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer.
Bhatia’s insight was to create synthetic molecules that can be introduced into the body, interact with cancer, and then be detected easily.
Si les récentes avancées en médecine sont venues à bout de nombreuses pathologies, certaines maladies donnent encore du fil à retordre au monde médical. Parmi elles, le cancer qui continue à faire des ravages partout dans le monde. Les traitements anticancéreux disponibles, qu'il s'agisse de la chimiothérapie (destruction des cellules cancéreuses grâce à l'utilisation de substances chimiques), de la radiothérapie (utilisation de rayons X) ou de la chirurgie (généralement complétée par les deux précédents), sont souvent très lourds pour les patients. La radiothérapie, utilisée sur plus de la moitié des patients atteints d'un cancer, occasionne ainsi des effets secondaires importants.
Machines are doing more and more of the work typically completed by humans, and detecting diseases may be next: a new company called Enlitic takes aim at the examination room by employing computers to make diagnoses based on images.
The answers Bert Vogelstein needed and feared were in the blood sample.
Vogelstein is among the most highly cited scientists in the world. He was described, in the 1980s, as having broken into “the cockpit of cancer” after he and coworkers at Johns Hopkins University showed for the first time exactly how a series of DNA mutations, adding up silently over decades, turn cells cancerous. Damaged DNA, he helped prove, is the cause of cancer.
Publication dans la revue Nature (Advanced online publication in Nature) : des chercheurs de l'Université libre de Bruxelles, ULB ont découvert les mécanismes moléculaires régulant l'initiation tumorale et les fonctions des cellules souches cancéreuses dans le cancer de la peau.
t’s been about six years since San Diego’s Epic Sciences was founded to commercialize technology that Peter Kuhn and others developed at The Scripps Research Institute for detecting and analyzing circulating tumor cells.
In more recent years, the company has moved rapidly to create an entirely new business based on its diagnostic technology. Epic Sciences says it has established about 30 partnerships and research collaborations with both pharmaceutical companies and academic scientists, and its technology is being used to analyze many types of cancer in thousands of patients. Over the past year, the company’s workforce has doubled, from 30 to about 60 employees.
In 95 percent of cases, cervical cancer is an entirely treatable disease and can be treated for $28 in less than 40 minutes. Yet, due to lack of access to physicians and reliable medical equipment, hundreds of thousands of women in low-resource settings are dying unnecessarily every year simply because they are not getting diagnosed in time. However, one Israeli startup seems to be well on its way to changing that.
Meet MobileOCT— a social startup which is using mobile phones to accurately detect cancer in people who live in the developing world.
Le tabagisme reste le premier facteur de risque de développement du cancer du poumon. Toutefois, 85% des fumeurs ne développeront jamais de cancer. Le risque est en effet inégalement réparti entre les individus. D'où l'intérêt d'un test permettant d'évaluer le risque individuel. Les chercheurs de l'Institut Weizmann ont mis au point un tel test, basé sur trois marqueurs biologiques [1] et qui exploite la corrélation entre capacité de réparation de l'ADN et probabilité de développer un cancer.
