Funding for Personalized Medicine, an Explanation of News Stories about Brain Cancer and Contraceptives, and More

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Here are a few highlights of cancer research news that have recently caught my attention:

  • AstraZeneca unveiled agreements that should enable the pharmaceutical company to tap into a promising, nascent gene technology aimed at making drugs more precise.
  • A group of researchers from Mass General has identified new targeted therapies for some aggressive cancers. The study, published in Science, details how disrupting a pathway used by cancerous cells to proliferate could be the key to inhibiting the growth and survival of tumors.
  • The Guardian examines a recent study published in the Annals of Clinical Oncology that predicts that lung cancer fatalities are set to overtake breast cancer deaths among European women in 2015.
  • Investigators at Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center have developed a new model that better predicts breast cancer risk in African-American women. Read the full story in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
  • According to new research by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators, vitamin D could exert a protective effect against colorectal cancer by enhancing the immune system’s capacity to detect cancer cells. The study, published in the journal Gut, provides the first experimental evidence of a link between vitamin D and anti-tumoral immune responses.
  • A nice explanation article in The Guardian clarifies how a study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology found an association (not causation) between hormonal contraceptive use and a rare form of brain cancer known as glioma. The coverage of this observational study stressed that the odds of any one birth control pill user getting a brain tumor are extremely small.
  • The New York Times reports that President Obama will ask Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to help advance medical research focused on the genetics of individual patients. Michael Joyner comments in an op-ed piece in the New York Times about President Obama’s major biomedical initiative, in specific precision medicine and the general topic of moonshots in medicine like the war on cancer. Keith Yamamoto, a biologist at the University of California, suggests in a Nature article that the budget outlined by Obama will not be sufficient to achieve the program’s goals.

Please feel free to contact Marisol Hernandez to share any comments.