Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have uncovered why some pancreatic and colorectal cancers fail to respond to Wnt inhibitors, a promising new class of cancer drugs currently under development for these cancers. Their discovery, published in Science Advances, not only offers a new cancer therapy target but also a potential screening tool to identify those patients who will not benefit from this new therapy once it becomes available.

New research shows that FOXO1 is required for memory in T cells and associated with more durable clinical responses to CAR T cell therapy.

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine suggest accelerated biological aging may be driving early-onset cancer rates in young people.

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progresses relentlessly. It gradually impairs a person’s ability to function until they ultimately become immobile and often develop dementia. In the U.S. alone, over a million people are afflicted with Parkinson’s, and new cases and overall numbers are steadily increasing.

There is currently no treatment to slow or halt Parkinson’s disease. Available drugs don’t slow disease progression and can treat only certain symptoms. Medications that work early in the disease, however, such as Levodopa, generally become ineffective over the years, necessitating increased doses that can lead to disabling side effects.

Continue reading “Breakthrough Parkinson’s Gene Discovery Sheds Light on Evolutionary Origin” »

The next innovation in cancer treatment could be to test all possible drugs on thousands of miniature versions of a person’s tumour, grown in the lab, to see which works the best. The technique, sometimes called drug sensitivity testing, may have already helped a few children with advanced cancer live for longer than the standard approach.

It could eventually become routinely used for everyone with cancer, says Diana Azzam at Florida International University in Miami. “I would say it will help guide treatments in any [cancer], whether it’s aggressive or not.”

An Israeli medtech company is using artificial intelligence to help oncologists decide the best and most effective course of treatment for their cancer patients.

OncoHost’s main focus is on treatments for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). According to the World Cancer Research Fund, lung cancer is the second most common cancer (after breast cancer) and responsible for 12.2 percent of new cases of the disease.

In fact, OncoHost CEO Ofer Sharon tells NoCamels, lung cancer “is the number one killer” among patients with this form of the disease.

Researchers have developed a functional precision medicine approach that targets cancer by combining genetic testing with a new way to test individual drugs on tumor samples. The results of the clinical study were published in Nature Medicine.

Surgeons at NYU Langone have performed the world’s first whole eye transplant. The recipient can’t see out of his new eye, but it’s still healthy more than five months after the operation — putting doctors a major step closer to restoring vision with donor eyes in the future.

The patient: Aaron James, a 46-year-old military vet living in Arkansas, was working as a high-voltage lineman in 2021 when he came in contact with a live wire. The accident caused severe burns that led to the loss of his left eye, his nose, his mouth, half of his face, and his left arm from just above the elbow.

Continue reading “Arkansas man receives world’s first eye transplant” »

Pulmonary diseases are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. For many progressive lung diseases like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a key issue is a low supply of new stem cells to repair and reverse damage. These cells are responsible for regenerating and increasing the growth of healthy tissue—without them, lung function decreases and a range of severe illnesses can take hold.