Treating patients with high-dose radiotherapy after chemotherapy and surgery for malignant pleural mesothelioma does not achieve improvements in local relapse and overall survival, according to data from a prospective randomized phase II trial presented at ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid. "Mesothelioma remains a difficult disease to find better treatment options for, so we asked whether high-dose hemithoracic radiotherapy would decrease the rate or delay the time of local recurrence after chemotherapy and radical surgery," says lead author Prof Rolf A. Stahel, from the ...

The BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib has significant anti-tumour activity in patients with advanced BRAF V600E mutant non-small cell lung cancer whose disease has progressed after chemotherapy, according to phase II data presented at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid, Spain. "Reports of lung cancers bearing mutations in BRAF have generated considerable interest because these mutations may be associated with increased sensitivity to BRAF tyrosine-kinase inhibiting agents," says lead author Dr David Planchard, pulmonary oncologist at the Gustav-Roussy Cancer Campus, Paris, France. ...

Droplets are simple spheres of fluid, not normally considered capable of doing anything on their own. But now researchers have made droplets of alcohol move through water. In the future, such moving droplets may deliver medicines, etc. To be able to move on your own – to be self-moving – is a feature normally seen in living organisms. But also non-living entities can be self-moving, report researchers from University of Southern Denmark and Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague, Czech Republic. The researchers have made alcohol droplets move in a life-like way, ...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29, 2014 — Oktoberfest is here, and that means beer. And there's nothing worse than reaching for a cold one, taking that first sip and realizing your beer's been skunked: chemicals have reacted to form compounds that cause an awful, bitter taste. This week, Reactions explains why beers get skunky, and what you can do to keep your brews from going bad. Learn all about it at http://youtu.be/9i4dHdQzTFg. INFORMATION: Subscribe to the series at Reactions YouTube, and follow us on Twitter @ACSreactions to be the first to see our latest videos. The American ...

What can DNA from the skeleton of a man who lived 2,330 years ago in the southernmost tip of Africa tell us about ourselves as humans? A great deal when his DNA profile is one of the 'earliest diverged' – oldest in genetic terms – found to-date in a region where modern humans are believed to have originated roughly 200,000 years ago. The man's maternal DNA, or 'mitochondrial DNA', was sequenced to provide clues to early modern human prehistory and evolution. Mitochondrial DNA provided the first evidence that we all come from Africa, and helps us map a figurative genetic ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal, September 29th, 2014 - The number of days an expectant mother was deprived of electricity during Quebec's Ice Storm (1998) predicts the epigenetic profile of her child, a new study finds. Scientists from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and McGill University have detected a distinctive 'signature' in the DNA of children born in the aftermath of the massive Quebec ice storm. Five months after the event, researchers recruited women who had been pregnant during the disaster and assessed their degrees of ...

A new study by researchers from the University of Montreal reveals the current state of knowledge about anorexia in men and boys. "Most of the knowledge about anorexia pertains to females. However, about 10% of persons affected are males, and we believe this figure is underestimated," says Laurence Corbeil-Serre, lead author of the study. "Our results show that there appear to be similarities between the behavioural symptoms of males and females, but certain particularities can be identified in males, especially related to personality, gender identity, and sexual orientation." The ...

Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers are the first to show that an irradiation plus transplantation combination approach in nonhuman primates can be used to treat or even possibly cure HIV/AIDS, and this new model is providing some answers about the "Berlin patient," the only human thought cured of AIDS. The study is published in the September 25 issue of PLOS Pathogens. Guido Silvestri, MD, division chief of Microbiology and Immunology at the Yerkes Research Center at Emory, and several of his research colleagues performed the first hematopoietic stem ...

About 210 million years ago when the supercontinent of Pangea was starting to break up and dog-sized dinosaurs were hiding from nearly everything, entirely different kinds of reptiles called phytosaurs and rauisuchids were at the top of the food chain. It was widely believed the two top predators didn't interact much as the former was king of the water, and the latter ruled the land. But those ideas are changing, thanks largely to the contents of a single bone. In a paper published online in September in the German journal Naturwissenschaften, Stephanie Drumheller of ...

Certain primordial stars—those 55,000 and 56,000 times the mass of our Sun, or solar masses—may have died unusually. In death, these objects—among the Universe's first-generation of stars—would have exploded as supernovae and burned completely, leaving no remnant black hole behind. Astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the University of Minnesota came to this conclusion after running a number of supercomputer simulations at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Minnesota Supercomputing ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Sept. 29, 2014 – Myriad Genetics, Inc. (Nasdaq: MYGN) today announced that its Tumor BRACAnalysis CDx™ companion diagnostic test significantly improved the detection of cancer-causing BRCA1/2 mutations by 44 percent in women with ovarian cancer. Data from this new study were presented at the 2014 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) annual meeting in Madrid, Spain. "Several previous clinical studies have demonstrated that patients with germline or somatic BRCA1/2 mutations respond to certain DNA-damaging medicines such as the platinum ...

Patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) were able to safely tolerate treatment with cells cultured from human placental tissue, according to a study published today in the journal Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders. The study, which is the first of its kind, was conducted by researchers at Mount Sinai, Celgene Cellular Therapeutics subsidiary of Celgene Corporation and collaborators at several other institutions. While designed to determine safety of the treatment, early signals in the data also suggested that a preparation of cultured cells called PDA-001 may repair ...

A new model developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge has shown that despite its apparent stability, the massive ice sheet covering most of Greenland is more sensitive to climate change than earlier estimates have suggested, which would accelerate the rising sea levels that threaten coastal communities worldwide. In addition to assessing the impact of the increasing levels of meltwater created and spilled into the ocean each year as the climate continues to warm, the new model also takes into account the role that the soft, spongy ground beneath the ice ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Scientists have discovered a previously unknown mechanism by which estrogen prepares cells to divide, grow and, in the case of estrogen-positive breast cancers, resist cancer drugs. The researchers say the work reveals new targets for breast cancer therapy and will help doctors predict which patients need the most aggressive treatment. The University of Illinois team reports its findings in the journal Oncogene. Estrogen pre-activates the unfolded-protein response (UPR), a pathway that normally protects cells from stress, the researchers report. The ...

Scientists have found amphibians worldwide are breeding earlier due to climate change, but how that affects species is just now being answered. After warmer winters, wood frogs breed earlier and produce fewer eggs, a Case Western Reserve University researcher has found. Michael F. Benard, the George B. Mayer Chair in Urban and Environmental Studies and assistant professor of biology, also found that frogs produce more eggs during winters with more rain and snow. Benard's study, published today in the journal Global Change Biology, is among the first in a natural habitat ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A nine-month-long, randomized controlled trial involving 221 prepubescent children found that those who engaged in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 60 minutes a day after school saw substantial improvements in their ability to pay attention, avoid distraction and switch between cognitive tasks, researchers report in the journal Pediatrics. Half of the study subjects were randomly assigned to the after-school program and the rest were placed on a wait list. All participants underwent cognitive testing and brain imaging before and after ...

People tend to perceive their dominant hand as staying relatively the same size even when it's magnified, lending support to the idea that we use our hand as a constant perceptual "ruler" to measure the world around us. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "These findings suggest that our bodies are used as perceptual metrics, meaning that we are more likely to attribute changes in the perceived size of the hand to changes in the world — instead of thinking that our hand has become bigger, we're more ...

More children than ever are being admitted to intensive care units in England and Wales but there are fewer staff per bed available to cope with the increase, according to a new report published jointly by the University of Leeds and University of Leicester. The Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) report showed that there was a 15% increase in admissions over a 10-year period between 2004 and 2013, but this included an increase of 4% that was not due to changes in the childhood population. At the same time, staffing levels have increased by 36% but this ...

BOSTON –– Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other institutions have discovered a sign of the early development of pancreatic cancer – an upsurge in certain amino acids that occurs before the disease is diagnosed and symptoms appear. The research is being published online today by the journal Nature Medicine. Although the increase isn't large enough to be the basis of a new test for early detection of the disease, the findings will help researchers better understand how pancreatic cancer affects the rest of the body, ...

New findings by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggest that an evolutionary arms race between rival elements within the genomes of primates drove the evolution of complex regulatory networks that orchestrate the activity of genes in every cell of our bodies. The arms race is between mobile DNA sequences known as "retrotransposons" (a.k.a. "jumping genes") and the genes that have evolved to control them. The UC Santa Cruz researchers have, for the first time, identified genes in humans that make repressor proteins to shut down specific jumping ...

The first direct comparison of treating non-squamous lung cancer with either pemetrexed or docetaxel in addition to cisplatin has shown that the two combinations achieve similar progression-free survival, although docetaxel was associated with more frequent adverse events. At the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid, Dr Young-Chul Kim from Chonnam National University Medical School, South Korea, reported the results of an open-label phase III trial that included 149 patients with non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) conducted at 14 centres in South Korea. "We wanted ...

Measuring the expression levels of an enzyme involved in DNA synthesis can help predict the response of lung cancers to certain treatments, a Korean study has shown at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid. In a randomized phase II study, researchers showed that patients whose lung cancers expressed low levels of an enzyme called thymidylate synthase experienced a greater benefit from treatment with the combination of pemetrexed and cisplatin than those whose tumours expressed high levels. "Thymidylate synthase is one of the proteins that is targeted by pemetrexed which ...

The introduction of biennial colorectal cancer screening in a region of France increased the rate of diagnosis of high risk pre-cancerous adenomas (sometimes called polyps) by 89%, researchers have reported at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid. Dr Vanessa Cottet from INSERM Unité 866 in Dijon, France, and colleagues studied the region of Côte-d'Or, where a registry has been collecting data on adenomas since 1976. They wanted to evaluate the rate of diagnosis of adenomas before and after the initiation of a screening program using fecal occult blood testing that began ...

Treatment with the targeted therapy drug crizotinib effectively halts the growth of lung tumors driven by rearrangements of the ROS1 gene. In an article receiving Online First publication in the New England Journal of Medicine to coincide with a presentation at the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting, an international research team reports that crizotinib treatment led to significant tumor shrinkage in 36 of 50 study participants and suppressed tumor growth in another 9. "Prior to this study, there were a handful of reports describing marked responses to crizotinib ...

Children who are exposed to chemotherapy or radiotherapy while in the womb suffer no negative impacts on mental or cardiac development, international studies presented at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid have shown. "When chemotherapy is administered after the first trimester of pregnancy, we cannot discern any problems in the children," says lead author Dr Frederic Amant, KU Leuven and University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium. "Fear about the risks of chemotherapy administration should not be a reason to terminate a pregnancy, delay cancer treatment for the mother, or ...