Burnham Institute for Medical Research today announced that scientists have created a peptide that binds to Bcl-2, a protein that protects cancer cells from programmed cell death, and converts it into a cancer cell killer. The research, which was published as the featured article in the October 7 edition of Cancer Cell, may lead to new cancer treatments.

A research team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is clarifying a previously unappreciated way that cellular processes are disrupted in cancer.

Virginia Commonwealth University Institute of Molecular Medicine and VCU Massey Cancer Center researchers have discovered how a gene, melanoma differentiation associated gene-9/syntenin (mda-9/syntenin), interacts with an important signaling protein to promote metastasis in human melanoma cells, a discovery that could one day lead to the development of the next generation of anti-metastatic drugs for melanoma and other cancers.

A research team, led by investigators at the Department of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University and the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson, has achieved a substantial "kill" of pancreatic cancer cells by using nanoparticles to successfully deliver a deadly diphtheria toxin gene.

Researchers at McGill University and the affiliated Lady Davis Research Institute of the Jewish General Hospital – along with colleagues at the University of Ottawa and the Ottawa Health Research Institute (OHRI) –report a significant breakthrough in the use of viruses to target and destroy cancer cells, a field known as oncolytic virotherapy.

Embryonic stem cells are always facing a choice—either to self-renew or begin morphing into another type of cell altogether.

University of Florida College of Pharmacy researchers have discovered a marine compound off the coast of Key Largo that inhibits cancer cell growth in laboratory tests, a finding they hope will fuel the development of new drugs to better battle the disease.

Genes that inhibit the spontaneous development of cancer are called tumor suppressor genes. One of the major tumor suppressors is p53, a protein that acts in the cell nucleus to control the expression of other genes whose products can inhibit cell proliferation (increase in cell number) and cell growth (increase in cell size).

The research was published today in an advanced, online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists from The Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and the University of California discovered that the underlying process in tumor formation is the same as for life itself—evolution. After analyzing a half million gene mutations, the researchers found that although different gene mutations control different cancer pathways, each pathway was controlled by only one set of gene mutations.

The invasion and spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body, known as metastasis, is a principal cause of death in patients diagnosed with breast cancer. Although patients with early stage, small, breast tumours have an excellent short term prognosis, more than 15 to 20 per cent of them will eventually develop distant metastases, and die from the disease.

A natural compound from magnolia cones blocks a pathway for cancer growth that was previously considered "undruggable," researchers have found.