Fluffy dust bunnies, fuzzy mold, or wild racoons can find refuge in the ductwork of any home, slowly sprawling out and quickly becoming a problem. And like any home, the tiny channels in our body can get blocked, sometimes by the dirtiest kind—cancer. Cholangiocarcinoma is a rare cancer that forms in the bile duct. The … Read more
Imagine reporting for duty and finding your director asleep, or worse, absent. Without a place to go and a task to perform, you have little choice but to sit idle. This scenario is exactly what cancer wants for T cells, the foot soldiers of the immune system. T cells get their marching orders to fight … Read more
Many cancer therapies work by docking into specific “binding pockets” on the surface of proteins that are driving the disease. Scientists are continually searching for new binding sites for future cancer drugs, but this process can be slow and cumbersome. Now, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in collaboration with scientists at MIT and École Polytechnique … Read more
Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, has been trying to understand how breast cancer forms ever since starting her lab at Dana-Farber in 1998. Specifically, she has wanted to know how ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a pre-cancerous state that appears only in the milk ducts in the breast, changes into invasive breast cancer, which is breast … Read more
In the rare event that an elevator cable breaks, modern buildings have additional fail-safe mechanisms. For example, counterweight and mechanical brakes prevent the car from plummeting to the ground. Similarly, cells have fail-safe mechanisms to prevent them from death under stress, according to new research from the lab of Dana-Farber investigator Loren Walensky, MD, PhD. A well-known process in cells keeps pro-death proteins at bay. Walensky … Read more
Under a microscope, normal adipose cells – which make up the body’s fatty tissue – look a bit like densely packed raindrops on a windshield. Each cell is filled with fat and is highly biologically active, regulating both metabolism and immunity. Liposarcoma, a cancer subtype that affects adipose tissue, perturbs these essential activities. In some … Read more
What is TIL (tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte) therapy? Tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte, or TIL, therapy uses a patient’s own immune system T cells to fight cancer. The therapy involves removing T cells from a piece of the patient’s tumor – where the T cells have congregated after being alerted to the cancer – growing them outside the body, then … Read more
Many animals, including house pets, produce their own vitamin C. Early human ancestors did too. But they lost the ability about 60 million years ago, trading the health benefits of vitamin C production for the ability to produce more energy. Yet vitamin C is still an essential nutrient for humans. Without it, humans develop scurvy, … Read more
The human genome is a sequence of Ts, Gs, Cs, and As that is about 3 billion letters long. And, says Bradley Bernstein, MD, PhD, chair of Dana-Farber’s Department of Cancer Biology, “there’s no dictionary or guide for reading it.” Bernstein is trying to make such a resource. The efforts so far, carried out by … Read more
On the surface of every cell are receptors that interact with the cellular world around them. These receptors play a variety of roles. The transferrin receptor 1 (TfR1), for instance, pulls iron into the cell for fuel. It does so rapidly and continuously, as if it were a child spinning in a revolving door. Approximately … Read more
In the family of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) proteins, CDK5 always seemed to be a misfit. Despite being structurally similar to other CDKs, and despite the “cyclin” in its name, it did not participate in the family business of ushering cells through the cycle of growth and division. Or so scientists thought, and textbooks said. In … Read more
Small cell lung cancer broadly consists of four molecular subtypes, three of which are driven by expression of proteins called transcription factors. Targeting these transcription factors has been a long-held goal, yet currently there are no medicines that target them directly. Rather, patients today receive standard-of-care treatment consisting of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Within a year, … Read more
In trial after clinical trial, metastatic colorectal cancer has been largely undeterred by immune checkpoint inhibitors. Although these drugs have shown effectiveness in Hodgkin lymphoma, lung cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, and nearly a dozen other malignancies, their track record against colorectal cancer has been lackluster, particularly for patients with the most common subtype of … Read more
What is BPDCN? Blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN) is a rare but aggressive blood cancer that can affect the skin, blood, and bone marrow. It has characteristics similar to lymphomas acute myeloid leukemia, but typically first appears as lesions in the skin. What are the treatment options for BPDCN? There are two drugs approved … Read more