What separates the few cancer cells that survive chemotherapy – leaving the door open to recurrence – from those that don’t? Weizmann Institute scientists developed an original method for imaging and analyzing many thousands of living cells to reveal exactly how a chemotherapy drug affects each one.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic have found that the experimental drug they are testing to treat a deadly form of thyroid cancer turns on a powerful tumor suppressor capable of halting cell growth. Few other cancer drugs have this property, they say.

Researchers at A*STAR's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) have become the first to discover and characterize a human protein called Bax-beta (Baxβ), which can potentially cause the death of cancer cells and lead to new approaches in cancer treatment. The finding is published in the 16 Jan. report of Molecular Cell.

Ever since the 1966 Hollywood movie, doctors have imagined a real-life Fantastic Voyage a medical vehicle shrunk small enough to “submarine” in and fix faulty cells in the body. Thanks to new research by Tel Aviv University scientists, that reality may be only three years away.

A group of Dartmouth researchers has found a new function for one of the proteins involved with chromosome segregation during cell division. Their finding adds to the growing knowledge about the fundamental workings of cells, and contributes to understanding how cell function can go wrong, as it does with cancerous cells.

Researchers from the University of Granada and the University of Barcelona have shown that treatment with maslinic acid, a triterpenoid compound isolated from olive-skin pomace, results in a significant inhibition of cell proliferation and causes apoptotic death in colon-cancer cells.

One of the current handicaps of cancer treatments is the difficulty of aiming these treatments at destroying malignant cells without killing healthy cells in the process.

Few things are as tiresome as house hunting and moving. Unfortunately, metastatic cancer cells have the relocation process down pat. Tripping nimbly from one abode to another, these migrating cancer cells often prove far more deadly than the original tumor.

A single tumor-suppressing gene is a key to understanding, and perhaps killing, dormant ovarian cancer cells that persist after initial treatment only to reawaken years later, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the December Journal of Clinical Investigation.

When researchers look inside human cancer cells for the whereabouts of an important tumor-suppressor, they often catch the protein playing hooky, lolling around in cellular broth instead of muscling its way out to the cells’ membranes and foiling cancer growth.

The Stowers Institute's Rong Li Lab has published findings that shed light on the ability of cells to adapt to disruptions to their basic division machineries – findings that may help explain how cancer cells elude the body's natural defense mechanisms or chemotherapy treatment. The work was published in the November 26 issue of Cell.

In human relationships, a certain "spark" often governs whether we prefer one person to another, and critical first impressions can occur within seconds. A team lead by Johns Hopkins researchers has found that cell-to-cell "friendships" operate in much the same way and that dysfunctional bonding is linked to the spread of cancer.