(Press-News.org) BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Cancer Act, launching a nationwide effort to combat the disease. Eighty-seven years later, despite significant progress, cancer treatment often falls short, with 50 to 80 percent of patients not responding to treatment and more than 600,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States.
What if clinicians could predict the success of any cancer treatment, ensuring each patient receives the most effective care?
The challenge lies in the diverse nature of the disease. There are hundreds of different types of cancers, characterized by the specific type of cell from which they originate. Even patients with the same cancer type require personalized treatments due to unique factors like genetic predisposition, lifestyle and immune response. The therapeutic outcomes — from complete remission to resistance to treatment — are unpredictable because cancer cells can develop resistance to drugs through genetic mutations, rendering therapy ineffective.
To tackle this complexity, a research team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham led by Anindya Dutta, Ph.D., professor and chair of the UAB Department of Genetics, sought to identify patterns within this apparent randomness. Leveraging established cancer cell databases — including the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer, or GDSC, the Cancer Therapeutics Response Portal, or CTRP, and the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancers, or COSMIC — the team investigated “whether gene expression levels correlate with drug response” across various cancer cell lines.
GDSC and CTRP provide information on how sensitive different cell lines are to various anti-cancer drugs, whereas COSMIC catalogs their gene expression. Divya Sahu in Dutta’s lab studied 777 cancer cell lines that were present in both databases and found 36 genes linked with anti-cancer drug resistance. One of these genes, FAM129B, was found to be particularly important in drug resistance by cancer cells. This finding aligns with previous experimental studies on FAM129B, validating the efficacy of the analytical approach employed in this UAB study.
The research group developed a combined score, named UAB36, using the 36 genes most linked to drug resistance. They found that the polygenic score UAB36 showed superior correlation with relative resistance to various anti-cancer drugs compared to existing polygenic scores.
The researchers applied UAB36 to predict the expression of genes linked with the resistance of breast cancer against tamoxifen, a drug widely used for breast cancer treatment. UAB36 consistently showed a higher efficacy compared to a single gene approach. UAB36 also outperformed established gene signatures like ENDORSE and PAM50 in its correlation with tamoxifen resistance in breast cancer cells.
The study crossed from the cell-line studies to application as a prognostic tool when the researchers used the UAB36 score to predict patient outcome in three different cohorts of actual breast cancer patients treated with tamoxifen. They found that patients with high UAB36 scores showed poorer survival independent of patient’s age and tumor stage, consistent with the expectation that this score predicts higher resistance to tamoxifen. The tumors with high UAB36 showed enrichment of gene sets associated with multiple drug resistance. This establishes UAB36 as a promising biomarker for predicting anti-cancer drug resistance and poor survival.
UAB36 has potential as a tool for personalized medicine, helping identify patients at higher risk of tamoxifen resistance and poor survival, suggesting that these patients will benefit from alternative treatment strategies. The study provides a map to help doctors choose the best cancer treatment and predict outcomes for each patient, though this has to be validated by a prospective clinical trial.
“This approach should provide promising polygenic biomarkers for resistance in many cancer types against specific drugs and can be improved further by incorporating machine-learning methods in the analysis,” Dutta said.
Besides Dutta, authors of the study, “Development of a polygenic score predicting drug resistance and patient outcome in breast cancer,” published in NPJ Precision Oncology, are Sahu and Isaac Andres Segura Rueda, UAB Department of Genetics. Additional co-authors are Jeffrey Shi and Ajay Chatrath, former members of Dutta’s lab at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Support came from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation of Alabama, a Cancer Genomics Cloud Collaborative Support grant and the National Institutes of Health grant CA060499.
At UAB, Genetics and Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics are departments in the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine.
END
A 36-gene predictive score of anti-cancer drug resistance anticipates cancer therapy outcomes
This polygenic score predicts tamoxifen treatment resistance is better than conventional methods, with potential for personalized medicine application.
2024-11-07
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Someone flirts with your spouse. Does that make your partner appear more attractive?
2024-11-07
Picture this: You’re at a bar when someone starts hitting shamelessly on your spouse or significant other, who doesn’t flirt back. As the scene unfolds, your base instincts kick in—annoyance, anger, jealousy—followed by a heightened sexual desire for your partner. You’re ready to reclaim the attention that should be rightfully yours, correct?
Not necessarily, according to a new study in the Journal of Sex Research by researchers at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and ...
Hourglass-shaped stent could ease severe chest pain from microvascular disease
2024-11-07
ROCHESTER, Minn. — A study at Mayo Clinic suggests that an hourglass-shaped stent could improve blood flow and ease severe and reoccurring chest pain in people with microvascular disease. Of 30 participants in a phase 2 clinical trial, 76% saw improvement in their day-to-day life. For example, some participants who reported not being able to walk around the block or up a flight of stairs without chest pain were able to do these ordinary physical activities at the end of a 120-day period. Clinical measures of blood flow related to the microvasculature of the heart significantly improved during ...
United Nations ratifies framework to protect people on cash app
2024-11-07
As mobile-money services were growing at a rapid clip in the developing world 10 years ago, University of Florida computer scientists and cybersecurity experts Kevin Butler and Patrick Traynor were early sentinels, raising concerns about the lack of security that could lead to real problems for the user.
In a 2014 study, the two professors from UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, uncovered security vulnerabilities of mobile cash apps, especially in the Global South, where such technologies were becoming essential in the absence of robust banking systems.
“Our early work uncovered ...
Oklahoma State basketball team joins the Nation of Lifesavers
2024-11-07
http://newsroom.heart.org/news/oklahoma-state-basketball-team-joins-the-nation-of-lifesavers?preview=8409af5e5a5f3127f6aec7e122cc9673STILLWATER, Okla., October 28, 2024 — The Oklahoma State University (OSU) men’s basketball team participated in an American Heart Association Hands-Only CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) training to learn the correct rate and depth of CPR compressions to be confident and capable when faced with a cardiac emergency. Learning Hands-Only CPR is the skill needed to join the Association’s Nation of Lifesavers™ movement, which is focused on doubling survival rates ...
Power of aesthetic species on social media boosts wildlife conservation efforts, say experts
2024-11-07
Facebook and Instagram can boost wildlife conservation efforts through public awareness and engagement, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Communication.
The findings based on the caracal – a wild cat native to Africa with distinctive tufted ears – demonstrate how social media can harness support for the predators, which some farmers shoot and poison.
Results show that the mammal’s similarity to a domestic feline has attracted thousands of followers to internet feeds about caracal conservation. ...
Researchers develop robotic sensory cilia that monitor internal biomarkers to detect and assess airway diseases
2024-11-07
Xiaoguang Dong, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is leading a team of researchers that has developed a system of artificial cilia capable of monitoring mucus conditions in human airways to better detect infection, airway obstruction, or the severity of diseases like Cystic Fibrosis (CF), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases (COPD) and lung cancer.
The research was published in the November 4 issue of PNAS in the article, “Sensory Artificial Cilia for In Situ Monitoring of Airway Physiological Properties.”
In their paper, the researchers noted that continuously ...
Could crowdsourcing hold the key to early wildfire detection?
2024-11-07
The 2023 blaze in Lahaina, Hawaii, which claimed more than 100 lives and burned 6,500 acres of land across Maui, is a tragic example of how rapid wildfire spread can make effective response efforts impossible, resulting in the loss of life and property.
What if technology could help people detect wildfires earlier? The solution could already be in your pocket: a mobile phone.
USC computer science researchers have developed a new crowdsourcing system that dramatically slashes wildfire mapping time from hours to seconds using a network of low-cost mobile phones mounted on properties in high fire threat areas. In computer simulations, the system, FireLoc, detected blazes igniting ...
Reconstruction of historical seasonal influenza patterns and individual lifetime infection histories in humans based on antibody profiles
2024-11-07
Reconstruction of historical seasonal influenza patterns and individual lifetime infection histories in humans based on antibody profiles
#####
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002864
Article Title: Reconstructed influenza A/H3N2 infection histories reveal variation in incidence and antibody dynamics over the life course
Author Countries: United Kingdom, China, United States
Funding: see manuscript END ...
New study traces impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global movement and evolution of seasonal flu
2024-11-07
UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 19:00 GMT / 14:00 US EASTERN TIME THURSDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2024
Increased capabilities for genomic surveillance have offered new insights into global viral evolution;
Seasonal flu showed a ‘remarkable’ bounce back to pre-pandemic levels once international air travel resumed;
Regions with fewer COVID-19 restrictions were associated with sustained flu virus transmission.
Seasonal influenza epidemics impose substantial burdens on healthcare systems and cause >5 million hospitalizations of adults each year. The current approach to influenza vaccine development requires comprehensive surveillance ...
Presenting a Janus channel of membranes for complete oil-and-water separation
2024-11-07
Named after the two-faced Roman god Janus to reflect its dual-purpose design, researchers present a novel membrane system – a Janus channel of membranes (JCM) – capable of simultaneously separating oil and water from complex emulsions. The system addresses a critical challenge for sustainable water and oil reclamation across various industries. Separating oil and water from complex mixtures is essential for many scientific and industrial applications, such as wastewater treatment and biological sorting. Membrane ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
C-Path announces key leadership appointments in neurodegenerative disease research
First-of-its-kind analysis of U.S. national data reveals significant disparities in individual well-being as measured by lifespan, education, and income
Exercise programs help cut new mums’ ‘baby blues’ severity and major depression risk
Gut microbiome changes linked to onset of clinically evident rheumatoid arthritis
Signals from the gut could transform rheumatoid arthritis treatment
Pioneering research reveals some of the world’s least polluting populations are at much greater risk of flooding fuelled by climate change
UK’s health data should be recognized as critical national infrastructure, says independent review
A 36-gene predictive score of anti-cancer drug resistance anticipates cancer therapy outcomes
Someone flirts with your spouse. Does that make your partner appear more attractive?
Hourglass-shaped stent could ease severe chest pain from microvascular disease
United Nations ratifies framework to protect people on cash app
Oklahoma State basketball team joins the Nation of Lifesavers
Power of aesthetic species on social media boosts wildlife conservation efforts, say experts
Researchers develop robotic sensory cilia that monitor internal biomarkers to detect and assess airway diseases
Could crowdsourcing hold the key to early wildfire detection?
Reconstruction of historical seasonal influenza patterns and individual lifetime infection histories in humans based on antibody profiles
New study traces impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global movement and evolution of seasonal flu
Presenting a Janus channel of membranes for complete oil-and-water separation
COVID-19 restrictions altered global dispersal of influenza viruses
Disconnecting hepatic vagus nerve restores balance to liver and brain circadian clocks, reducing overeating in mice
Mechanosensory origins of “wet dog shakes” – a tactic used by many hairy mammals – uncovered in mice
New study links liver-brain communication to daily eating patterns
Defense or growth – How plants allocate resources
Study identifies hip implant materials with the lowest risk of needing revision
Study reveals how plants grow thicker, not just taller
Insect-killing fungi find unexpected harmony in war
Unlocking predictors of success in treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)
New PFAS removal process aims to stamp out pollution ahead of semiconductor industry growth
Researchers identify reduction in heart failure-related risk factors following metabolic surgery
The Kenneth H. Cooper Institute at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center unveiled in Dallas
[Press-News.org] A 36-gene predictive score of anti-cancer drug resistance anticipates cancer therapy outcomesThis polygenic score predicts tamoxifen treatment resistance is better than conventional methods, with potential for personalized medicine application.