PHARMA LITERATI

The world scientific community is waging a difficult and prolonged war on cancer. New research in the field of immunogenic cell death can extend the area of drugs application and ensure patients' protection from relapse after therapy. Cancer treatment is not just the removal of the tumor cells from the body, and chemotherapy. The doctors' aim is to provide a scenario that would prevent tumor cells from proliferating and causing a new disease. For many years, scientists at the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod and the University of Ghent (Belgium) have been engaged in research aimed to minimize the harm to the body after cancer treatment and have been looking for new approaches to treating cancer patients. The project, supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation and headed by Dmitry Krysko, leading researcher of the Lobachevsky University's Institute of Biology and Biomedicine, professor at Ghent University, has yielded its first major...

A new “smart needle” has been developed by scientists to detect cancerous tissue using light. The researchers, funded by The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)’s Invention for Innovation programme, created a technology dubbed the “smart needle”, a probe that can identify cancerous tissues or cells “almost instantly.” The probe works by using a technique called “Raman spectroscopy”, which consists of shining a low power laser onto tissue and measuring the light reflected back. So far the probe has been tested on 68 patient samples in the laboratory, showing it can differentiate between healthy and cancerous tissue. Made up of fibre-optics encased within a fine needle, the probe can look for cancer under the skin’s surface in areas such as the neck. Healthy tissue gives a different signature of reflected light from cancerous tissue, and research shows it is possible to detect a “fingerprint” of the disease that can be used to spot cancerous tissue in a few second...

The plant that adds flavor, color and bitterness to beer also produces a primary compound that thwarts cancer cells, and two important derivatives of the compound do as well, new research at Oregon State University shows. Unlike the primary compound, xanthohumol, known as XN, the derivatives don't metabolize into phytoestrogens. Phytoestrogens are plant-based chemicals similar to female sex hormones that help some types of tumors grow and can cause other health problems as well. The research showed, for the first time, that the derivatives have cancer-fighting effectiveness similar to that of XN in liver and colon carcinomas. That means the two non-estrogenic derivatives are attractive alternatives for testing, along with XN, in future preclinical studies. The study was published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. Xanthohumol is produced by humulus lupulus, the common hop plant. More than 20 years ago, researchers discovered that XN inhibits cell gr...