Patients with node-positive breast cancer that becomes node-negative after neoadjuvant chemotherapy can omit regional nodal irradiation (RNI) without increasing their risk for recurrence, suggests data presented at the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The de-escalation of treatment could spare a large proportion of patients the side effects associated with…

A groundbreaking study conducted at Northwestern Medicine suggests that an artificial intelligence (AI) tool could spare breast cancer patients unnecessary chemotherapy treatments by more accurately predicting patient outcomes. The research, published today in Nature Medicine, shows that the AI tool outperformed the analysis of disease by expert pathologists. While current…

A new study finds that chemotherapy drugs known as microtubule poisons do not work the way researchers have suspected for decades. Earlier studies showed that one microtubule drug, paclitaxel, works by interfering with mitosis to kill cancer cells though it does not stop the mitotic process entirely. This study confirms…

New research reveals that an important priming phase makes breast cancer cells previously exposed to sublethal drug concentrations refractory to higher doses.  Using spatiotemporal modeling, a University of Ottawa (uOttawa) team found, specifically, that chemotherapy-resistant breast cancer cells throughout the cellular concentration gradient have higher expression of the solute carriers…

Adding immunotherapy to chemotherapy almost doubled survival in patients with an advanced type of bladder cancer, in the first of its kind trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine and at the annual meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). The multicenter, international study was co-led by Mount Sinai…

An international trial funded by Cancer Research UK and UCL Cancer Trials Centre has shown that adding a short course of chemotherapy prior to chemoradiation therapy (CRT) improves outcomes by substantially reducing the risk for relapse and death among patients with locally advanced cervical cancer. The induction chemotherapy (IC) regimen,…

Studies from Emory University reveal how treatment with chemotherapy may awaken breast cancer cells from dormancy and trigger renewed growth. The research describes the mechanisms involved—the release of two cell-signaling cytokines—and how blocking these targets prevented awakening from dormancy. The findings published in PLOS Biology show for the first time…

Chemotherapy has at least two shortcomings: It can harm healthy cells as well as cancerous ones, and it can have difficulty reaching therapeutic targets that hide within cancer cells. To get around these shortcomings, biomedical engineers at Binghamton University collaborated with colleagues in China have found a method whereby cancer…

Researchers at City of Hope have developed a new targeted chemotherapy that shows promise against all solid tumor types, in preclinical studies. The new drug candidate, AOH1996, targets proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) a protein once that to be “undruggable” with early research showing that the targeted chemotherapy appears to…

University of Illinois Chicago researchers have demonstrated how mitochondrial enzymes move into the cell nucleus to help protect heart cells from the damage caused by some chemotherapy drugs. The research was published recently in Nature Communications. “Chemotherapy-induced cardiac damage remains a leading cause of death amongst cancer survivors. Anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity is…

Scientists at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, have developed a first-of-its-kind, orally administered drug that can disrupt prostate cancer cell metabolism while simultaneously delivering the chemotherapy drug cisplatin directly into treatment-resistant prostate cancer cells. Cisplatin, a well established chemotherapy drug on the…

Chemotherapeutic agents are widely known to carry an increased risk of heart failure and other forms of cardiovascular damage. A new study from the University of Toronto finds that Black patients or patients of African ancestry are at particular risk, with 71% higher odds of experiencing cardiotoxicity compared to White…

Researchers have identified racial disparities in patient response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) for early-stage breast cancer, which could have a biological basis. They found that Black women were less likely than White women to achieve pathologic complete response (pCR) after NACT, defined as the absence of invasive cancer in the…

Moffit Cancer Center researchers have reported in Nature Medicine that use of an oncolytic virus treatment in combination with chemotherapy can boost response rates during neoadjuvant therapy for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). The modified oncolytic herpes simplex 1 virus—talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC)—is already approved to treat advanced melanoma. It is injected…

Administering chemotherapy to colon cancer patients before surgery reduces the risk of the cancer returning according to a clinical trial of patients in the UK, Denmark, Sweden. The FOxTROT trial, funded by Cancer Research UK, demonstrated a 28% reduce risk of colon cancer returning when chemotherapy was given before, instead…