Cancer treatments would be so much more effective if only each patient’s therapy could be uniquely designed to cater to his/her genetic makeup. Noteworthy developments have been made by researchers at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre by using a brand new chip that searches for hundreds of mutations in genes.

Personalized medicine is actually a better approach in order to find the best fitting treatment and optimal dosage levels that would have minimum side effects on the patient. This comes into play much more now with new developments being made every day, new drugs manufactured and new treatments discovered. The reason behind the need for personalized treatment options is that each person’s genes are varied, encoding proteins - which determines the effectiveness of the drug and its side effects as well.

John F. Deeken, a pharmacogenetic researcher at Lombardi said, “Currently, available genotyping tools test only a few genes at a time. With a new chip called DMET, as many as 170 genes can be examined for more than a thousand variations. This type of turnkey testing, if validated, could eventually replace highly specialized, time consuming and labor intensive testing — thus allowing more institutes the opportunity to pursue genotyping and pharmocogenetic research. That alone would be a significant development for our field and for expediting the research many of us believe is the future of medicine.”

Developments such as this are vital for cancer research that will help with creating new drugs and treatments as well. If this pans out well and genetic coding can be monitored in the future, then unique medicines can be doled out, based on genetic variations that are linked to the effectiveness of the drug as well as its toxicity.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham now have valuable insight into how limited-calorie diets prolong the survival of human cells. The recent discovery was published in the FASEB Journal and stated that this revelation could mean new developments in drugs and other treatments that could counter the human aging process and cancer.

Trygve Tollefsbol, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham said, “Our hope is that the discovery that reduced calories extend the lifespan of normal human cells will lead to further discoveries of the causes for these effects in different cell types and facilitate the development of novel approaches to extend the lifespan of humans. We would also hope for these studies to lead to improved prevention of cancer as well as many other age-related diseases through controlling calorie intake of specific cell types.”

The research involved Tollefsbol and his team using cells from normal human lungs as well as from pre-cancerous human lungs, which were at the initial stages of cancer. Both sets of lungs were grown in the lab and were given either normal or condensed levels of glucose. The growth of the cells was monitored over several weeks, as was their dividing ability and the survival of cells over the same period. The conclusion at the end of the period was that normal, healthy cells survived for a longer period when given lesser amounts of sugar, as opposed to the pre-cancerous cells, which died.

“Western science is on the cusp of developing a pharmaceutical fountain of youth. This study confirms that we are on the path to persuading human cells to let us to live longer, and perhaps cancer-free lives,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal.

If you are interested in whitening your teeth, you might be tempted to skip a trip to the cosmetic dentist and instead try using special “whitening toothpaste” that can be purchased at any grocery store. However, don’t be fooled - while whitening toothpaste does have its benefits, it’s no substitute for the type of deep cleaning and whitening that can be provided by leading cosmetic dentists in Toronto like Andrew Charkiw and Armaghan Afsar.

This is because whitening toothpastes are actually misleading — they don’t whiten teeth at all. All they do is remove stains from the teeth (such as those caused by coffee or cigarettes). While this will improve your smile, it won’t actually make it whiter. So if you are looking for that celebrity smile, you need to consider cosmetic dentistry options such as custom bleaching treatments or light-activated gels. This also ensures that the procedure will be done effectively and achieve the results you are looking for from teeth whitening.

The Medication Exposure in Pregnancy Risk Evaluation Programme (MEPREP) is a new research programme that intends to support research on studying the effects of using prescription medicines during pregnancy. MEPREP will work alongside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and researchers from the HMO Research Network Center for Education and Research in Therapeutics (CERT) and research centers from Kaiser Permanente and Vanderbilt University.

A recent article published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology states that around two-thirds of women while being pregnant take at least one prescription medication. With the use of medication during pregnancy as an appropriate safety measure only tested in a handful of clinical trials, it should be addressed, as the health of both mother and child is a cause for concern.

Margaret Hamburg, MD, Commissioner of Food and Drugs said, “This program is a great example of FDA and the private sector working together to improve the health of pregnant women and their children. This data will guide regulatory policy and influence medical practice.”
MEPREP’s strategy incorporates the sharking of healthcare information for mothers and babies in every single research site participating in the programme. This will aid to counter the deficiency of clinical trial data regarding the utilization of medication during pregnancy.

Currently, around eleven participating websites contain information for over one million births from 2001-2007, with a large number of these mothers having used prescription medication while being pregnant. With the new programme in place, the FDA says retrieving relevant information from the network is far more efficient and makes the research process easier and more accurate.

“This collaborative effort creates a unique resource to study the effects of medication in pregnant women and their children. Results of these studies will provide valuable information for patients and physicians when making decisions about medication during pregnancy,” says Gerald Dal Pan, M.D., director of the Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

The December issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology included a study which stated that alterations to the BRCA1 gene were linked with the premature decrease in egg reserve. The BRCA1 gene is associated with an early onset of breast cancer. The findings in this study could perhaps provide some insight towards the connection between infertility and breast/ovarian cancer.

The study, carried out by a team led by Dr. Kutluk Oktay, MD, Director, Division of Reproductive Medicine & Infertility, Westchester Medical Center subjected 126 women suffering from breast cancer to ovarian stimulation with the intention of fertility preservation by embryo or oocyte cryopreservation.

The ratio of women who are BRCA mutation positive is 1:1000, with an incidence rate of 2.5% found amongst particular ethnic groups.
According to the findings of the study, a unique correlation exists between low response to ovarian stimulation with fertility drugs and BRCA1 mutations. This in turn then proposes a possible connection between infertility and breast/ovarian cancer. Studies of this nature are especially useful with families holding a history of breast and/or ovarian cancer with larger studies to be conducted on the subject.

The results of the study also include the following:

57% of the study population underwent a BRCA testing
14 of them had a mutation in BRCA genes
A low ovarian response rate was much higher in BRCA mutation-negative patients in comparison to BRCA mutation-negative patients and BRCA untested women
All BRCA mutation-positive low responders had BRCA1 mutations
Low response not encountered in women who were only BRCA2 mutation positive
BRCA1 mutation and not BRCA2 mutation-positive women produced a lower numbers of eggs