Posts are written by library staff and reflect their personal opinions not necessarily those of MSK.
MSK’s Dr. Charles Sawyers recently won the inaugural STAT Biomedical Innovation Award. Earlier this month, STAT published a video of an interview with Sawyers, during which he discusses stories behind his groundbreaking work and his hopes for the future of cancer treatment.
Dr. Sawyers is MSK’s Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program. Learn more about his discoveries of targeted cancer therapies in this MSK feature.
What is blood made of? While you may think that this question has already been well answered, French researchers discovered the presence of a new component in the blood.
In a breakthrough study published in The Faseb Journal, the authors report their discovery of the presence of fully functional, respiratory competent, extracellular mitochondria in blood. Prior to this study only cell‐derived mitochondrial components have been found in the extracellular space. Interestingly, Mitochondria seem to be present in large numbers: “We estimate that there are between 200 000 and 3.7 million cell-free intact mitochondria per mL of plasma”.
This discovery may have implications for cancer diagnosis. As mentioned in Science Daily, “the research team is now devoting its attention to evaluating the extracellular mitochondria as biomarkers in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis and cancer.”
Both plasma of healthy individuals and cell culture media contain structurally intact mitochondria. Fluorescence microscopy images of the MitoTracker Green stained 16gP from PPAP plasma A, SW620 CCCM B, and DLD-1 CCCM C, Electron microscopy images of the 16gP from of a PPAP plasma D, SW620 CCCM E, and DLD-1 CCCM F. From: Al Amir Dache, Z., Otandault, A., Tanos, R., Pastor, B., Meddeb, R., Sanchez, C., … & El Messaoudi, S. (2019). Blood contains circulating cell‐free respiratory competent mitochondria. The FASEB Journal.
The cancer death rate in the United States dropped 2.2% from 2016 to 2017, the most recent data available. This is the largest annual decrease ever reported.
“Long‐term trends in cancer incidence rates for all cancers combined by sex.” From Siegel, R. L., Miller, K. D., & Jemal, A. (2020). Cancer statistics, 2020. CA: a cancer journal for clinicians, 70(1), 7–30. doi:10.3322/caac.21590.
In discussing this American Cancer Society data, numerous outlets quoted MSK physicians. In The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Helena Yu pointed to advances in immunotherapy as one factor in the decline. On NBC Nightly News, Dr. Larry Norton mentioned these treatment advances while describing some areas of concern. While screening is “very good” for colorectal cancer and breast cancer, he said, “not everybody is taking advantage of that.”
Stat News and Biopharmadrive.com included content tweeted by Dr. Peter Bach. He noted that the increase in other causes of death, like suicide and overdoses, may have contributed to the decline in cancer mortality.