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Cancer drugs should add months, not weeks, say experts

From Nature Medicine. Published online 7 January 2011. In the last decade, the world’s drug regulatory agencies have approved dozens of new anticancer therapies for everything from lung carcinoma to skin melanoma. Some of these new drugs add months to a patient’s life. But others may offer only an extra week or two, on average, often with considerable toxicity and at a cost of thousands of dollars. Now experts are questioning whether these outcomes provide meaningful benefit to people’s quality of life and are urging regulatory agencies to toughen the criteria for drug approval. Such a measure would push pharmaceutical … Read more…

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Control Freaks

Tiny genetic snippets called microRNAs may promote metastasis Biologists know quite a bit about the steps that turn a normal cell into a cancerous one. Their understanding of metastasis, on the other hand, is somewhat more hazy. Now a short stretch of genetic material has been implicated in the spread of breast cancer, according to a study in the Oct. 11 Nature. Molecular biologist Li Ma of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, in Cambridge, Mass., has identified a type of microRNA—a tiny genetic molecule—that can coax breast cancer cells to spread to other tissues. MicroRNAs regulate the expression of … Read more…