Archives of Cancer Biology and Therapy

Cancer has its own disease burden and patients usually suffer from symptom clusters when they are referred for palliative treatment. Identification of symptom cluster trajectories will help clinician to take into account measures that can optimize quality of life of palliative patients. Therefore the aim of this paper is to determine the overall prevalence of symptoms and symptoms clusters in different disease groups according to etiology at the time of first visit to Palliative care clinic by using HIS Palliative First Assessment note indicating Edmonton symptom scale.

Although NK cells are recognized as effector lymphocytes of the innate immune system, they also regulate the adaptive immune response by releasing inflammatory cytokines and developing immunological memory. Unlike other lymphocytes such as T or B cells, NK cells do not express rearrangeable, antigen-specific receptors. 

The transient receptor potential mucolipin 1 (TRPML1) is an endolysosomal channel belonging to the TRP family. Clinically, mutations of TRPML1 have been responsible for a severe lysosomal storage disorder called mucolipidosis type IV.

In last decades, video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS) together with robotic-assisted thoracic surgery (RATS) can be considered the biggest innovation in thoracic surgery. This approach drastically changed the way of performing surgical operations, improving patient’s outcome undergoing thoracic surgery.

Observational studies have demonstrated association of metformin with reduced cancer incidence and mortality in multiple cancer types, including gastrointestinal (GI) malignancies. Anti-neoplastic effects of metformin are believed through many mechanisms including activation of AMP-activated protein kinase, which controls mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) growth regulatory pathway.

In order to implement the knowledge of cancer to monitor its evolution and setting, in the last decade, new minimally invasive and repeatable samples collection have been developed such as liquid biopsy. Cancer biomarkers originating from tumors can represent the molecular status of the tumor or its metastases which release them directly into body fluids or indirectly due to disruption of tumor/metastatic tissue. These biomarkers are detectable in liquid biopsy.

Tumor node metastasis (TNM) staging system is the most useful method in predicting prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC), the third most common cause of death worldwide, even if other biological markers are currently under evaluation to assess their role in affecting CRC outcome and planning the best tailored therapeutic approach. Several molecular factors are being demonstrated to be effective in influencing both overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) in CRC, acting on different aspects of tumor promoting and progression.

In a recent paper, we introduced a variant of the classical Simeoni tumor growth model, and illustrated its value in assessing tumor growth in a reproducible mouse model for mammary tumors. Our modification consisted of incorporating delay differential equations in the mathematical formulation of the Simeoni model, to represent the delay in drug action often observed under chemotherapeutic or immunotherapeutic regimens.

During the last few decades, immunotherapy is considered to be an important approach to help our immune system to fight various kinds of diseases, such as tumor. Sometimes, it works very well for some types of cancers, for example: bladder cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer and lymphoma.

Glucocorticoids (GCs) are defined by their role in maintaining glucose homeostasis and natural GCs are a class of corticosteroids secreted by the adrenal cortex. Cortisol is the most important natural GC in humans. Cellular cortisol levels are regulated by the tissue-specific metabolic enzymes 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase 1 and 2 (11β-HSD 1 and 2); 11β-HSD 1 converts inactive cortisone to active cortisol, while 11β-HSD 2 has the opposite function.

Background: We have recently published SL-BioDP, a web resource for querying, exploration and visualization of potential synthetic lethal targets and possible synergistic drug combinations for 18 cancer types. Methods: From our predictive synthetic lethality model used in SL-BioDP, we inferred TP53 mutation lead to potential synergistic drug combination of Bortezomib and Vorinostat. Here we show, how to extrapolate the drug combination results by combining drug screening data from cancer cell lines and showed the potential synergy of the drug targets, proteasome, and histone deacetylase (HDAC) pathways respectively, for patient survival advantage.

The gut microbiome or gut flora is a vast community of microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and fungi that inhabit the digestive tract of the human and other animals. In the human body, bacterial species colonize into the oral cavity, skin, vagina, and placenta, however, the largest population of microorganisms resides in the intestine. The majority of gut microbiota belong to the phyla Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria.

Metastatic malignant melanoma of the small bowel is a rare and aggressive disease, without specific symptoms. Due to that, most cases are diagnosed in advanced stages, presenting as an acute abdomen in situations of bowel obstruct ion or perforation. We present the case of a 56-year-old male who was admitted for generalized edema and developed an acute abdomen secondary to perforation of small bowel malignant melanoma metastasis, with lymph node invasion.

Cancer is a worldwide public health issue that affects millions of people every year. In 2018 there were 17 million newly documented cases of cancer globally (8.8 million in men and 8.2 million in women), leading to 9.6 million deaths. Cancer is a vastly heterogeneous disease, with over 100 different types of cancer currently identified in humans; the most common types of cancer are lung, female breast, bowel and prostate, these four types account for more than 40% of all new cancer case

In the last 10 years, the marker “Human Epididymis protein 4 (HE4)” for the management of gynecological tumors has entered powerfully in the world literature. At the moment, carrying out an accurate research in the main scientific portals such as PubMed, we can find more than 2,000 works concerning Cancer antigen-125 (Ca125), but those concerning HE4 are less than 400. The assessment of the prognostic significance of Ca125 has been described in more than 1000 scientific papers, whereas in the case of HE4 such works are only about 100.

Expansion of Circulating Tumor Cells (CTC), the metastatic seeds of cancer in the blood stream, holds great potential in clinical application, especially towards precision medicine. Given the relatively rare nature of CTCs, their culture remains to be a significant challenge. When developing technologies for CTC culture, there are key elements that need careful consideration, including the speed of culture, compatibility with downstream analysis, and the implementation of the technology into established clinical daily routines. Herein, we briefly discuss the implications of our recent report of an ultrathin filter for the capture and culture of circulating colon cancer cells.

Phytophthora infestans is the causal agent of late blight disease, which affects potato and tomato crops worldwide, that brings about significant economic losses in the production of these crops. The PITG_06016 gene codes for one of the 7 glucokinases present in this phytopathogen.

We recently published our multi-institutional experience performing primary robot-assisted retroperitoneal lymph node dissection (RA-RPLND) for men with non-seminomatous germ cell tumor (NSGCT). We concluded that primary RA-RPLND for NSGCT can be performed safely with low complication rates, acceptable early oncologic outcomes, and lower overall theoretical chemotherapy burden. In this commentary, we explore outcomes in clinical stage I patients stratified by clinical risk factors (RF) and estimate reductions in chemotherapy burden.

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer worldwide, affecting nearly one in eight women. Accurate cancer staging is essential for determining the patient’s prognosis and for choosing the appropriate treatment. The staging system most often used is the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) TNM system, where T refers to the size of the tumor, N refers to spread of the primary cancer to nearby lymph nodes, and M refers to the spread of metastasis to distant sites in the body.

However, the entire coagulation cascade is dysfunctional, in progressed chronic diabetes and cancer patients. Platelets (PLTs) in type 2 diabetic (DT2) involved in Thrombosis and Haemostasis (T&H) of individuals adhere to vascular endothelium and aggregate more voluntarily than those in healthy individuals, as are abnormalities in the microvascular and macrovascular circulations. However it is already known that the circulating PLTs are essential for T&H, inflammation growth factors delivery, regeneration; and knowledge of their function is fundamental to understanding the pathophysiology of vascular disease in diabetes and cancer-related diseases.