MSKCC in the News: January 26 – February 8

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Mark

MSKCC’s Howard Scher presented findings for the investigational oral drug MDV3100 at the 2012 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Genitourinary Cancers Symposium.
Dr. Monica Morrow of MSKCC was quoted in a New York Times article about a study that examined the outcomes of breast cancer surgeries in women from four institutions and three health plans.
MSKCC researchers reported that a scale used to measure bone metastases has been found useful in determining whether some prostate cancer patients are responding to chemotherapy. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

MSKCC in the News: January 12 – January 25

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Mark

MSKCC researchers contributed to a study published in Pediatrics that found that the majority of pre-adolescents do not regularly use sunscreen despite the fact that many of them suffered sunburns at some point during their childhood, which increases the risk of developing melanoma later in life.
Dr. Peter T. Scardino of MSKCC was quoted in a Huffington Post article about the implications of a recent study that found a new gene variant linked with a higher risk of developing hereditary prostate cancer.
Researchers from MSKCC have shown in mouse models that a single dose of the commonly used antibiotic, clindamycin, wiped out nearly 90 percent of bacterial taxa, leaving the mice unusually susceptible to infection by Clostridium difficile.

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Mark

The use of radiotherapy in the treatment of patients with Merkel cell carcinoma appeared to be well tolerated in a group of site-specific patients with adverse features, according to the results of a study conducted at MSKCC.
In a paper published in Nature, MSKCC researchers show that the zinc finger protein Ars2 is necessary and sufficient to promote NSC [neural stem cell] self-renewal, and does so by positively regulating the expression of Sox2.
Lead Investigator Nancy Lee, MD of MSKCC and her team reported that over 90% of patients treated with a combination of the widely used anti-cancer drug bevacizumab with standard chemo-radiation therapy survived for 2 years with no distant metastases and that the disease did not progress in 75% of patients.