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The protein survivin could be a useful biomarker for pancreaticcancer by 123wert sdfsf
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The protein survivin could be a useful biomarker for pancreaticcancer |
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Pancreatic cancer kills more than 40,000 people every year, and among cancers it's particularly insidious. For 80 percent of patients, thedisease is already so advanced at the time of diagnosis thattreatment is unlikely to provide significantly life-extendingbenefits. For patients diagnosed with localized pancreatic cancer,the five-year survival rate remains barely above 20 percent,according to the National Cancer Institute. New research fromscientists at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, which waspresented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2012, shows that a proteincalled survivin could be a useful tool in understanding pancreaticcancer - particularly for identifying which subsets of patientswill most likely respond to treatment. In a recent study of pancreatic cancer patients who had undergonetumor resection, the scientists found that patients who underwentdifferent treatment regimens, following surgery, had differentlevels of survivin and experienced different lengths ofdisease-free survival.
"Biomarkers for pancreatic cancer are especially useful because thesurvival is so poor and it's such a bad disease for people to get,"says Saad Khan, M.D., a medical oncology fellow at Fox Chase."We're looking for biomarkers that tell us how the cancer willbehave, whether or not it's a more aggressive type that will spreadto different parts of the body. Most importantly for our research,we want to see if there are drugs that work better in patients withsurvivin than in those who don't have it." They first studied cancerous tissues from 88 patients who had hadpancreatic tumors, as well as nearby lymph nodes, surgicallyremoved at Fox Chase. The researchers found higher levels ofsurvivin in the cells from the lymph nodes than in the cells fromthe primary tumor. They went on to measure survivin in cells from60 patients, of the original 88, who had undergone chemotherapy orradiation after surgery.
The patients with higher levels ofsurvivin lived longer periods of time before the cancer returned.The connection was strongest and statistically significant inpatients who received the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine, though theresearchers found similarly suggestive trends among patients whoreceived radiation therapy or 5-FU. "We found that when there was a higher amount of survivin expressedin the nucleus, there was significantly longer disease-freesurvival for all patients," says Khan. "In terms of overallsurvival, patients treated with chemotherapy or radiation didbetter when they had higher amounts of survivin which goes againstwhat we'd expected, but this did not achieve statisticalsignificance. Our results suggest that people with higher levels ofsurvivin responded better to specific chemotherapies." Survivin - which is readily detectable in cancerous and embryonictissues but not in most healthy tissue - is a protein that blocksapoptosis, or cell death. Because of its strong association withcancer, researchers have long sought ways to use survivin to betterunderstand and treat the disease.
"Survivin has been looked at quite carefully in many cancers," Khansays, "but there's been no clear information about how it isexpressed in a large number of pancreatic cells." Khan, finishing up his third year of medical oncology training,came up with the idea to study survivin with his mentor, Barbara A.Burtness, M.D., associate director for clinical research andprofessor of medical oncology at Fox Chase. The researchers used asurgical specimens linked to a patient database prepared bycoauthor and surgical oncologist John P. Hoffmann, M.D. It's too early to know how useful survivin will be as a prognosticindicator.
Khan says the next step is to study more pancreaticcancer samples and try to understand all the different variablesthat can impact a person's survival. The researchers have alsostarted studying survivin in other tumor samples, including thosefrom patients treated for head and neck cancers. "There's a lot of work being done in biomarkers for more aggressivecancers, like pancreatic," Khan says. "We are hoping to find waysto improve on existing chemotherapies, which are ineffective forcontrolling disease for a significant period of time," Additional References Citations. I am Apparel & Fashion writer, reports some information about shoe shine equipment , esprit kids shoes.
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