Dr Stephen Taylor and Karen Gascoigne at the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences have taken a new systematic approach to studying anti-mitotic drugs, which are used extensively for breast or ovarian cancer in the UK.

Why do cancer patients develop resistance to chemotherapy drugs, sometimes abruptly, after a period in which the drugs seem to be working well to reduce tumors or hold them in check? Although largely a mystery to scientists, the result when this occurs is all too familiar: patients relapse and in many cases die when their cancers become resistant.

Cancer is a disease characterised by important metabolic alterations. Not only these adaptative changes give higher proliferative capacity to cancer cells, but they also contribute to higher resistance to chemotherapeutic agents.

Researchers from McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine have discovered a compound that reduces resistance to chemotherapy agents used to treat cancer. Their results were published in the June issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI).

New data show that CAPHOSOL, an advanced electrolyte solution, relieves painful oral mucositis (OM) and improves quality of life for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation therapy. These data will be reported in two separate presentations, one today in an oral podium presentation and one tomorrow as a poster session, at the 33rd Annual Congress of the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS).

Medical College of Wisconsin researchers in Milwaukee have shown for the first time that thrombopoietin (TPO), a naturally occurring protein being developed as a pharmaceutical to increase platelet count in cancer patients during chemotherapy, can also protect the heart against injury during a heart attack.

Combining a herpes virus genetically altered to express a drug-enhancing enzyme with a chemotherapy drug effectively and safely reduced the size of highly malignant human sarcoma grafted into mice.

Cancer treatment with chemotherapeutic agents is often associated with delayed adverse neurological consequences - an occurrence often referred to as “chemobrain” - that may compromise the quality of life of a proportion of cancer survivors.

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have identified, characterized and cloned ovarian cancer stem cells and have shown that these stem cells may be the source of ovarian cancer’s recurrence and its resistance to chemotherapy.

In a discovery that may be useful for maintaining remission in chemo-resistant ovarian cancer, Yale scientists report that pre-clinical studies have shown the drug compound NV-128 can induce the death of ovarian cancer cells by halting the activation of a protein pathway called mTOR.

Researchers at the University of Southern California have discovered that making mice fast prior to intensive chemotherapy treatments protected them from the side effects. Could the results make it so humans can survive cancer treatments with the same response?

Patients with breast cancer who developed anemia during chemotherapy had nearly three times the risk of local recurrence as those who did not, according to a study published in the April 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Researchё a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.