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IMAGE: When TRF1 is phosphorylated by AKT, telomeres are normal (top); in the cell lines where AKT doesn t modify TRF1, telomeres are shorter and have a lower potential to generate tumours. view more
Credit: PLOS Genetics
The Telomeres and Telomerase Group led by Maria A. Blasco at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) continues to make progress in unravelling the role that telomeres -the ends of chromosomes that are responsible for cellular ageing as they shorten- play in cancer. The CNIO team was among the first to propose that shelterins, proteins that wrap around telomeres and act as a protective shield, might be therapeutic targets for cancer treatment. Subsequently, they found that eliminating one of these shelterins, TRF1, blocks the initiation and progression of lung cancer and glioblastoma in mouse models and prevents glioblastoma stem cells from forming secondary tumours. Now, in a study published in
University of Washington researchers have developed a new skill for a smart speaker that for the first time monitors both regular and irregular heartbeats without physical contact.
Cancer patients often experience fragmented care, particularly as they undergo cancer treatments. Although family physicians seek to provide continuous and comprehensive care, they often lose touch with their cancer patients during the treatment phase.
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Nursing homes with the largest proportions of non-White residents experience 3.3 times more COVID-19 deaths than do nursing homes with the largest proportions of White residents, according to a new study from the University of Chicago. The paper, published in
JAMA Network Open, suggests that these differences are likely due to nursing home size and the level of coronavirus spread in the local community, reinforcing the inseparability of long-term care facilities from society at large when it comes to bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to heel.
Since the start of the pandemic, between 35% and 40% of COVID-19 deaths have been associated with long-term care facilities. Senior author R. Tamara Konetzka, PhD, the Louis Block Professor of Public Health Sciences and the College at UChicago, wanted to bring her 25 years of experience studying nursing homes to ask why these facilities were experiencing such devastation from the coronavirus and if it was possible to predict which nurs
ISB and a collaborative team of researchers looked at hexokinase-2, or HK2, a key enzyme in glucose metabolism. A set of previous reports from our collaborator Dr. Herschman (co-author of the paper) and others revealed that cancer cells often rely on HK2 to elevate glucose metabolism to fuel their uncontrolled growth, making this enzyme a desirable target for testing, said ISB Assistant Professor Dr. Wei Wei, the lead corresponding author of the paper.
Conventional CTC detection methods, as exemplified by the FDA-cleared CellSearch system, normally rely on the use of a family of proteins called cytokeratins (CKs) that are typically found in epithelial tissues. As roughly 90 percent of human cancers arise in epithelial tissues and express CKs, these methods work very well in many major cancer types. However, their performance in NSCLC is suboptimal, despite the highly aggressive nature of NSCLC, which represents a long-standing puzzle in this field.