Encephalitis

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have now become the first investigators in the Western world to show that arsenic effectively induces remission in patients who have relapsed with APL, a potentially fatal type of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow. The findings are reported in the November 5 issue of the New [...]

AML is a life-threatening disease in which certain white blood cells become cancerous and rapidly replace and destroy normal bone marrow and blood cells. AML is among the most serious forms of adult leukemia, with a relatively high fatality rate. Most patients require intensive chemotherapy to achieve complete remission, and some also must undergo bone [...]

Scientists at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research developed the screen to identify mutations that cause patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, or CML, to become resistant to Gleevec, a “magic bullet” cancer-fighting drug that targets the protein produced by BCR/ABL, the gene that causes this rare form of leukemia. “In the leukemia cells of a CML [...]

Led by Julie Ross, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and a member of The Cancer Center, researchers analyzed data from the Iowa Women’s Health Study to determine whether taking aspirin or other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen could protect against the leukemia. Since 1985, the Iowa Women’s Health Study has followed more than [...]

The protein Shp2 is required for normal growth factor and cytokine signaling. Mutations in Shp2 cause Noonan Syndrome (NS), which is associated with an increased risk of juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML), and Shp2 mutations have been associated with sporadic JMML as well as other leukemias. Dr. M. Golam Mohi, a research fellow from the Neel [...]

Despite the resounding success of anticancer drug imatinib (Gleevec) as a treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a small but growing number of patients develop resistance to the drug and relapse. Imatinib inhibits the activity of Bcr-Abl, a protein that is abnormally active in most CML patients. Relapse and resistance to imatinib in patients with [...]

"While Gleevec represents a major treatment advance for CML – approximately 95 percent of patients treated with Gleevec achieve remission – there clearly is a need for therapies that produce longer remissions, are active against advanced disease, and can be used when Gleevec loses effectiveness," says Dana-Farber’s James Griffin, MD, senior author of the study. [...]

A new study found that higher levels of specialized blood cells that originate in bone marrow may potentially be used as a prognostic marker in liver cancer. The study showed that elevated levels of endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), the precursors to endothelial cells that are found in the lining of blood vessels, were found in [...]

Reported in the advance issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (which appears on-line the week of January the findings point to a possible new diagnostic method for these malignancies, which occur when blood cells remain in an immature stage within the bone marrow and never sufficiently develop into the mature cells [...]

"We believe this to be the first large systematic evaluation of the risk factors leading to leukemic transformation in primary myelofibrosis," says Dr. Huang, hematology researcher at Mayo Clinic. "And in the process, we discovered some unexpected results." The researchers confirmed a number of clinical and laboratory variables that appeared to correlate with leukemic transformation. [...]