PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Target of new cancer treatment valid for breast as well as blood cancers: study

Results reinforce rationale for clinical trials expected to begin in May

Target of new cancer treatment valid for breast as well as blood cancers: study
2021-01-21
(Press-News.org) One more piece of the puzzle has fallen into place behind a new drug whose anti-cancer potential was developed at the University of Alberta and is set to begin human trials this year, thanks to newly published research.

"The results provide more justification and rationale for starting the clinical trial in May," said first author John Mackey, professor and director of oncology clinical trials in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. "It's another exciting stepping stone to finding out if this is going to be a new cancer treatment."

The drug PCLX-001 is designed to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting enzymes involved in myristoylation, a process key to the cell signalling system that is often defective in cancer cells. The molecule was originally developed by the University of Dundee as a treatment for African sleeping sickness. U of A cell biologist Luc Berthiaume was the first to realize it could work against cancer.

For this study, Mackey and his collaborators examined breast tumours from more than 700 women who had participated in a worldwide clinical trial for another drug in 1998. They found that 28 per cent of the tumours contained the enzyme N-myristoyltransferase 2 (NMT2), and that the patients who had those tumours were more likely to die during the following 10 years.

"This shows that one of the targets of our drug, the enzyme NMT2, is clinically important to overall survival," said Mackey, who is also co-founder and chief medical officer of Pacylex Pharmaceuticals, the U of A spinoff company set up to develop PCLX-001.

The researchers also reported that breast cancer cells treated with PCLX-001 in the laboratory were less viable, and that the drug slowed tumour growth by 90 per cent in mice with human breast cancer. These results are similar to those reported last fall on PCLX-001's effect against lymphoma, a blood cancer which affects the infection-fighting cells of the immune system.

The clinical trial will take place in three Canadian centres, including the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, and will enrol patients with advanced and previously treated lymphoma, breast, lung, colon or bladder cancers. The aim is to find the optimal dose of PCLX-001 for effectiveness and safety.

"This will be the first time anyone has ever received PCLX-001 or a drug of this class," Mackey noted. "It's very exciting, but there are many unknowns."

The study was funded by the Alberta Cancer Foundation and the Cure Cancer Foundation.

"We've had tremendous support from the local investor and donor communities for our made-in-Alberta innovation," Mackey said.

INFORMATION:


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Target of new cancer treatment valid for breast as well as blood cancers: study

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

How fellow students improve your own grades

How fellow students improve your own grades
2021-01-21
Better grades thanks to your fellow students? A study conducted by the University of Zurich's Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics has revealed that not only the grade point average, gender and nationality peers can influence your own academic achievement, but so can their personalities. Intensive contact and interaction with persistent fellow students improve your own performance, and this effect even endures in subsequent semesters. Personality traits influence many significant outcomes in life, such as one's educational attainment, income, career achievements or health. Assistant Professor Ulf Zölitz of the University of Zurich's Department of Economics and Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development has investigated how one's own personality affects fellow students. The ...

Lasers create miniature robots from bubbles (video)

Lasers create miniature robots from bubbles (video)
2021-01-21
Robots are widely used to build cars, paint airplanes and sew clothing in factories, but the assembly of microscopic components, such as those for biomedical applications, has not yet been automated. Lasers could be the solution. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have used lasers to create miniature robots from bubbles that lift, drop and manipulate small pieces into interconnected structures. Watch a video of the bubble microrobots in action here. As manufacturing has miniaturized, objects are now being constructed that are only a few hundred micrometers long, or about the thickness of a sheet of paper. But it is hard to position ...

Rocks show Mars once felt like Iceland

Rocks show Mars once felt like Iceland
2021-01-21
HOUSTON - (Jan. 20, 2021) - Once upon a time, seasons in Gale Crater probably felt something like those in Iceland. But nobody was there to bundle up more than 3 billion years ago. The ancient Martian crater is the focus of a study by Rice University scientists comparing data from the Curiosity rover to places on Earth where similar geologic formations have experienced weathering in different climates. Iceland's basaltic terrain and cool weather, with temperatures typically less than 38 degrees Fahrenheit, turned out to be the closest analog to ancient Mars. The study determined that temperature had the biggest impact on how rocks formed from sediment ...

COVID-19 model reveals key role for innate immunity in controlling viral load

2021-01-21
Since SARS-CoV-2 was identified in December 2019, researchers have worked feverishly to study the novel coronavirus. Although much knowledge has been gained, scientists still have a lot to learn about how SARS-CoV-2 interacts with the human body, and how the immune system fights it. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science have developed a mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 infection that reveals a key role for the innate immune system in controlling viral load. The COVID-19 pandemic has created tremendous socioeconomic problems and caused the death of almost 2 million people worldwide. Although vaccines ...

Innovations through hair-thin optical fibres

Innovations through hair-thin optical fibres
2021-01-21
Scientists at the University of Bonn have built hair-thin optical fibre filters in a very simple way. They are not only extremely compact and stable, but also colour-tunable. This means they can be used in quantum technology and as sensors for temperature or for detecting atmospheric gases. The results have been published in the journal Optics Express. Optical fibers not much thicker than a human hair today not only constitute the backbone of our world-wide information exchange. They are also the basis for building extremely compact and robust sensors with very high sensitivity for temperature, chemical analysis and much more. Optical resonators or filters are important components cutting out very narrow spectral lines from white light sources. In the simplest case such filters ...

Inflammation caused by scorpion venom should be blocked immediately, study shows

Inflammation caused by scorpion venom should be blocked immediately, study shows
2021-01-21
Tityus serrulatus, the Yellow scorpion, causes more deaths than any other venomous animal in Brazil. Its sting can induce heart attack and pulmonary edema, especially in children and the elderly. According to the Brazilian Health Ministry, more than 156,000 cases of scorpion envenomation, 169 fatal, were reported in the country in 2019. Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) have demonstrated for the first time that in severe cases of scorpion envenomation a systemic neuroimmune reaction produces inflammatory mediators leading to the release of neurotransmitters. A paper reporting the results of their study is published in Nature Communications. It suggests the inflammatory process can be inhibited by administration of a corticosteroid almost immediately after the ...

New sodium oxide paves the way for advanced sodium-ion batteries

2021-01-21
Skoltech researchers and their collaborators from France, the US, Switzerland, and Australia were able to create and describe a mixed oxide Na(Li1/3Mn2/3)O2 that holds promise as a cathode material for sodium-ion batteries, which can take one day complement or even replace lithium-ion batteries. The paper was published in the journal Nature Materials. Lithium-ion batteries are powering the modern world of consumer devices and driving a revolution in electric transportation. But since lithium is rather rare and challenging to extract from an environmental standpoint, researchers and engineers have been looking for more sustainable and cost-effective alternatives for quite some time now. One option is sodium-ion technology, as sodium is much more abundant than ...

How lockdown has changed life for Russian women

2021-01-21
Researchers Yulia Chilipenok, Olga Gaponova, Nadezhda Gaponova and Lyubov Danilova of HSE - Nizhny Novgorod looked at how the lockdown has impacted Russian women during the COVID-19 pandemic. They studied the following questions: how women divided their time; how they worked from home; how they got on with their partners and children; and how they dropped old habits and started new ones in relation to nutrition, health, beauty, and self-development. In cases in which the whole family had to stay home together for a long time, it was largely women on whom the family's adaptation to the new reality depended. The paper was published in the Woman in Russian Society Journal. It is difficult to find a strictly academic definition for today's 'self-isolation'. According to the ...

Tiny high-tech probes reveal how information flows across the brain

Tiny high-tech probes reveal how information flows across the brain
2021-01-21
A new study from researchers at the Allen Institute collected and analyzed the largest single dataset of neurons' electrical activity to glean principles of how we perceive the visual world around us. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, captures the hundreds of split-second electrical signals that fire when an animal is interpreting what it sees. Your brain processes the world around you nearly instantaneously, but there are numerous lightning-fast steps between light hitting your retinas and the point at which you become aware of what's in front of you. Humans have three dozen different brain areas responsible for understanding the visual world, and scientists still don't ...

Merging technologies with color to avoid design failures

Merging technologies with color to avoid design failures
2021-01-21
Various software packages can be used to evaluate products and predict failure; however, these packages are extremely computationally intensive and take a significant amount of time to produce a solution. Quicker solutions mean less accurate results. To combat this issue, a team of Penn State researchers studied the use of machine learning and image colorization algorithms to ease computational load, maintain accuracy, reduce time and predict strain fields for porous materials. They published their work in the Journal of Computational Materials Science with accompanying presentations and proceedings in Procedia Engineering. "There is always a human side to design," said Chris McComb, assistant professor of engineering design in the School of Engineering Design, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Are lifetimes of big appliances really shrinking?

Pink skies

Monkeys are world’s best yodellers - new research

Key differences between visual- and memory-led Alzheimer’s discovered

% weight loss targets in obesity management – is this the wrong objective?

An app can change how you see yourself at work

NYC speed cameras take six months to change driver behavior, effects vary by neighborhood, new study reveals

New research shows that propaganda is on the rise in China

Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds

Novel genes linked to rare childhood diarrhea

New computer model reveals how Bronze Age Scandinavians could have crossed the sea

Novel point-of-care technology delivers accurate HIV results in minutes

Researchers reveal key brain differences to explain why Ritalin helps improve focus in some more than others

Study finds nearly five-fold increase in hospitalizations for common cause of stroke

Study reveals how alcohol abuse damages cognition

Medicinal cannabis is linked to long-term benefits in health-related quality of life

Microplastics detected in cat placentas and fetuses during early pregnancy

Ancient amphibians as big as alligators died in mass mortality event in Triassic Wyoming

Scientists uncover the first clear evidence of air sacs in the fossilized bones of alvarezsaurian dinosaurs: the "hollow bones" which help modern day birds to fly

Alcohol makes male flies sexy

TB patients globally often incur "catastrophic costs" of up to $11,329 USD, despite many countries offering free treatment, with predominant drivers of cost being hospitalization and loss of income

Study links teen girls’ screen time to sleep disruptions and depression

Scientists unveil starfish-inspired wearable tech for heart monitoring

Footprints reveal prehistoric Scottish lagoons were stomping grounds for giant Jurassic dinosaurs

AI effectively predicts dementia risk in American Indian/Alaska Native elders

First guideline on newborn screening for cystic fibrosis calls for changes in practice to improve outcomes

Existing international law can help secure peace and security in outer space, study shows

Pinning down the process of West Nile virus transmission

UTA-backed research tackles health challenges across ages

In pancreatic cancer, a race against time

[Press-News.org] Target of new cancer treatment valid for breast as well as blood cancers: study
Results reinforce rationale for clinical trials expected to begin in May