A Johns Hopkins team has stopped in its tracks a form of blood cancer in mice by engineering and inactivating an enzyme, telomerase, thereby shortening the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres.

A new study says targeting smaller (ЎЬ5 mm) lesions does little to significantly reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) and, in fact, results in extremely high financial costs and a large proportion of adverse events.

A drug under study to treat various cancers selectively kills cancer cells because of its affinity for a modified version of a critical heat shock protein they contain, researchers have found.

Building on their 2005 discovery of an enzyme that is a natural tumor suppressor, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have now identified two variants of that enzyme which could provide new targets for therapies to treat diabetes, heart and neurological disease.

For the first time, scientists from the University of Washington School of Medicine, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Cambridge have determined how a plant hormone - auxin - interacts with its hormone receptor, called TIR1.Their report, on the cover of this week's issue of Nature, also may have important implications for the treatment of human disease, because TIR1 is similar to human enzymes that are known to be involved in cancer.

A study led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC) and Harvard Medical School has identified seven genetic risk factors-DNA sequences carried by some people but not others-that predict risk for prostate cancer.