Category Archives: In the News

Time Restricted Eating, Circadian Rhythms, and More

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A selection of cancer research in the news this past week…

  • An animal study on breast cancer showed that eating within just an eight-hour window every day could “prevent the development of tumours”. The study’s lead researcher, Dr. Manasi Das, suggested that “this intervention may be effective in breast cancer prevention and therapy”. The study on time restricted eating was formally presented at ENDO 2019 conference (March 23-26, New Orleans).
  • Researchers from Tulane University established that circadian disruption caused by exposure to dim light at night may contribute to the metastatic spread of breast cancer to the bone. This animal study was also presented at ENDO 2019 conference.
  • Also focused on breast cancer, a trial conducted at Marshall University demonstrated that walnut consumption altered gene expressions related to tumor progression and could “decrease breast cancer growth and survival”. The new study on this ongoing research is in press and is due to be published in Nutrition Research. Note: Primary funding for this study “was from the California Walnut Commission to WEH”.
  • Researchers from Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine conducted a study that uncovered “how cancer cells with identical genomes can respond differently to the same therapy”. The study published in Nature Communications established the “relationship between mitochondria variability and drug response” which “may lead to more effective targeted cancer treatments”.
  • University of Bradford and University of Surrey, UK researchers discovered that prostate cancer cells “spit out” a protein from their nucleus taken up by other cells, including normal cells, which provokes tumor growth. The study was published in Scientific Reports.
  • A study conducted by researchers from the UK and Spain determined that a protein produced by melanoma cells triggers reprogramming of healthy immune cells to prevent them from attacking cancer cells and to help them survive instead. The study was published in Cell.

Automating Genetic Variation Classification at MSK

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Researchers at MSK have developed a free online tool to automate the interpretation of genetic variants. The study, led by computational biologist Vignesh Ravichandran and supervised by Dr. Vijai Joseph, was published in February in Genetics in Medicine and reported recently by GenomeWeb.

PathoMAN logo

PathoMAN logo

Until recently only a few genes, like BRCA1 and BRCA2, were tested in people with a family history of cancer. Thanks to declining costs and technological advances, labs now offer broader gene panel testing for hereditary cancers. However, interpreting the genetic variants uncovered by sequencing is time consuming and challenging, taking up two hours for a novel variant.

In response to these challenges, the MSK team created the automated tool PathoMAN. It uses guidelines from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the Association of Molecular Pathology as a framework while aggregating publicly available records of evidence to determine clinical significance. When tested against a manually classified gold-standard set of 3,513 variants from three major commercial labs, PathoMAN concorded with 94.4% of the manually curated pathogenic variants. PathoMAN is fast and uniform, and it generates a variant curation report for one variant in 30 seconds.

The research team next plans to incorporate natural language processing into PathoMAN to allow it to add scientific literature to its analyses.

PathoMAN is openly available to the research community at http://pathoman.mskcc.org/.

Pancreatic Cancer in the Spotlight

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Last week, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek announced that he has been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. New York Times reporter Gina Kolata spoke with experts, including MSK’s Dr. William Jarnagin, to explain the diagnosis.

Most pancreatic tumors are adenocarcinomas, an aggressive cancer with a high risk of recurrence. It is hard to diagnose because the pancreas is located deep inside the body, making biopsies difficult, and the cancer’s symptoms are generally not felt until the cancer is at an advanced stage. In recent years, treatment (surgery when possible, chemotherapy, and sometimes radiation) has improved the median survival time to 54 months.

To learn more about pancreatic cancer, including clinical trials at MSK, visit MSK’s patient information page.