In the Press

NCI Press Release
(Posted: 6/2/2013) - Scientists at the National Institutes of Health, and their colleagues, have discovered that a gene called BACH2 may play a central role in the development of diverse allergic and autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, asthma, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and type-1 diabetes.

NIH Press Release
(Posted: 5/22/2013) - Fungal infections of the skin affect 29 million people in the United States. In the first study of human fungal skin diversity, National Institutes of Health researchers sequenced the DNA of fungi that thrive at different skin sites of healthy adults to define the normal populations across the skin topography and to provide a framework for investigating fungal skin conditions.

NCI Press Release
(Posted: 5/2/2013) - Patients with advanced alveolar soft part sarcoma (ASPS), a rare cancer, achieved some control of their disease using an experimental anti-cancer drug called cediranib. The results from this largest clinical trial on ASPS to date were published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology

NCI News Note
(Posted: 4/17/2013) - Scientists have overcome a major impediment to the development of effective stem cell therapies by studying mice that lack CD47, a protein found on the surface of both healthy and cancer cells. They discovered that cells obtained from the lungs of CD47-deficient mice, but not from ordinary mice that have the CD47 gene, multiplied in a culture dish and spontaneously converted into stem cells

NCI News Note
(Posted: 4/15/2013) - National Cancer Institute (NCI) investigators have designed a genetically engineered mouse for use in the study of human lung squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). SCC is a type of non-small cell lung carcinoma, one of the most common types of lung cancer, with a five-year survival rate of about 15 percent.

NCI Press Release
(Posted: 4/10/2013) - Patients with a type of cancer known as primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma who received infusions of chemotherapy, but who did not have radiation therapy to an area of the thorax known as the mediastinum, had excellent outcomes, according to clinical trial results.

NCI News Note
(Posted: 4/9/2013) - Scientists at NCI have found that a protein, FBXW7, which acts as a tumor suppressor, is also important for the reduction in strength of inflammatory pathways. It has long been recognized that a complex interaction exists between cancer causing mechanisms and inflammation.

NCI Perspective
(Posted: 4/8/2013) - More often than not, cancer immunotherapies that work in adults are used in modified ways in children. Seldom are new therapies developed just for children, primarily because of the small number of pediatric patients relative to the adult cancer patient population. Depicted are members of NCI’s Pediatric Oncology Branch. From left: Drs. Crystal Mackall, Daniel Lee, and Alan Wayne

NCI News Note
(Posted: 4/1/2013) - Scientists at NCI have found that a mitochondrial chaperone protein, TRAP1, may act indirectly as a tumor suppressor as well as a novel target for developing anti-cancer drugs. Chaperone proteins, such as TRAP1, help other proteins adapt to stress, but scientists are coming to appreciate that they have other functions as well, such as, in this case, affecting tumor development.

NCI News Note
(Posted: 2/7/2013) - Findings from clinical trial patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma, a common kidney cancer, show they did not have accelerated tumor growth after treatment with sunitinib, in contrast to some study results in animals.

NCI Press Release
(Posted: 2/5/2013) - A protein associated with conditions of metabolic imbalance, such as diabetes and obesity, may play a role in the development of aggressive forms of breast cancer, according to new findings by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and their colleagues.

NCI News Note
(Posted: 1/24/2013) - Research by scientists at the NCI has identified a new class of DNA sites in cells that break early in the replication process. They found that these break sites correlate with damage often seen in B cell cancers, such as diffuse large B cell lymphoma.