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Magazine
In the July 6 SN: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, stone tool dates face scrutiny, ocean plastic goes deep, records of Inca taxation, erosion spurred plate tectonics and more.
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News
Antioxidants may encourage the spread of lung cancer rather than prevent it
06/27/2019 - 11:02 Cancer, Health, GeneticsAntioxidants, once touted as a cancer preventive, may actually spur the disease’s spread. Now scientists have figured out how.
Whether taken as a dietary supplement or produced by the body, antioxidants appear to help lung cancer cells invade tissues beyond the chest cavity, two studies report online June 27 in Cell. Experiments in mice and human tissue revealed that antioxidants both...
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News in Brief
Almost all healthy people harbor patches of mutated cells
06/06/2019 - 14:00 Genetics, CancerNormal isn’t always normal. A new study finds that large groups of cells in healthy tissues carry mutations, including ones tied to cancer.
About 95 percent of healthy people had patches of mutated cells in at least one of the 29 tissues examined, including kidney, muscle and liver, researchers report in the June 7 Science. Most of those mutations found in the 488 people in the study are...
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News
Eating a lot of fiber could improve some cancer treatments
03/01/2019 - 12:32 Microbiology, Cancer, Immune ScienceWhat you eat can affect how well immune therapies work against cancer. High-fiber diets may change gut microbes and make these therapies more effective, but taking probiotics could do the opposite.
Researchers looked at people with melanoma skin cancer who were getting a kind of immune therapy called PD-1 blockade or checkpoint inhibition (SN: 10/27/18, p. 16). Those who ate a high-fiber...
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Feature
Vitamin D supplements aren’t living up to their hype
01/27/2019 - 06:00 Clinical Trials, Nutrition, CancerIn the supplement world, vitamin D is a bit like a Kardashian. Its fame seemed to come out of nowhere about a decade ago, garnering so much press so fast that it’s hard to remember a time when people weren’t talking about it.
Vitamin D had long been known for protecting bones, but its star began to rise in the early 2000s after researchers made connections hinting that vitamin D was good...
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News
A new 3-D printed ‘sponge’ sops up excess chemo drugs
01/15/2019 - 09:00 Cancer, Chemistry, TechnologyBringing the filtering abilities of a fuel cell into the blood vessels of living organisms, a new device could cut down on toxic effects of cancer treatment.
At the heart of this approach — recently tested in pigs — is a tiny, cylindrical “sponge” created by 3-D printing. Wedged inside a vein near a tumor being treated with chemotherapy, the sponge could absorb excess drug before it...
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News
Tumor ‘organoids’ may speed cancer treatment
12/17/2018 - 12:00 Cancer, Biomedicine, CellsSAN DIEGO — Collecting cancer cells from patients and growing them into 3-D mini tumors could make it possible to quickly screen large numbers of potential drugs for ultra-rare cancers. Preliminary success with a new high-speed, high-volume approach is already guiding treatment decisions for some patients with recurring hard-to-treat cancers.
“Believe it or not, for some rare cancers...
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News
Discovery of how to prod a patient’s immune system to fight cancer wins a Nobel
10/01/2018 - 14:30 Cancer, PhysiologyStopping cancer by removing brakes on the immune system has earned James P. Allison of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University in Japan the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
“Allison’s and Honjo’s discoveries have added a new pillar in cancer therapy,” Nobel committee member Klas Kärre said in an Oct. 1 news conference...