Connecting Research and Experts with Journalists

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On September 9th, millions of people across the United States and Canada are expected to tune into the fifth biennial Stand Up to Cancer broadcast raising money for cancer research. Since 2008, SU2C has raised more than $370 million and dedicates 100% of funds raised to support collaborative research via its multi-institutional, multidisciplinary Dream Teams. Researchers with UCSF’s Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center have been involved in four Dream Teams and awarded a grant for innovative research.

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By employing the same tactics it used to drive policymaking from the 1970s-1990s, the tobacco industry has become successful in influencing pro-industry e-cigarette laws at the state level, according to a UCSF study published in the September issue of Milbank Quarterly.

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UC San Francisco scientists have engineered human immune cells that can precisely locate diseased cells anywhere in the body and execute a wide range of customizable responses, including the delivery of drugs or other therapeutic payloads directly to tumors or other unhealthy tissues. In experiments with mice, these immune cells, called synNotch T cells, efficiently homed in on tumors and released a specialized antibody therapy, eradicating the cancer without attacking normal cells.

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The UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of only 12 academic centers in the U.S. joining a large national precision medicine study that aims to improve survival for pancreatic cancer patients. The trial, called Precision Promise, is a joint effort between the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, cancer research and treatment centers, and the pharmaceutical industry. The goal of Precision Promise is to double survival by 2020.

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A team of researchers led by UC San Francisco scientists has identified a new drug target for triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive disease subtype that has the poorest outcomes and accounts for as many as one in five cases. The findings are particularly noteworthy because drugs that act on the newly discovered target, a protein known as PIM1, are already in clinical trials for leukemia and multiple myeloma.

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Karla Kerlikowske, MD, and team recently published a paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that examined the role of common risk factors in the development of ER-positive and ER-negative breast cancers. The study sheds new light on how a woman’s age, weight, and menopausal status affect her risk for breast cancer. Dr. Kerlikowske discusses the findings below.

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Scalp cooling can lessen some chemotherapy-induced hair loss – one of the most devastating hallmarks of cancer – in certain breast cancer patients, according to a new multicenter study from UC San Francisco, Weill Cornell Medicine and three other medical centers.   A majority of the study’s patients, all women with stage 1 or 2 breast cancer who underwent scalp cooling, retained more than half of their hair after completing chemotherapy, the investigators learned.

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Choosing among cancer treatments increasingly involves determining whether tumor cells harbor specific, mutated “oncogenes” that drive abnormal growth and that may also be especially vulnerable or resistant to particular drugs. But according to a new study led by UCSF researchers, in the case of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving oncogene, called KRAS (pronounced “kay-rass”), response to treatment can change as tumors evolve, either when a normal copy of the gene from the other member of the matched chromosome pair is lost, or when the cancers cells evolve to produce additional copies of the mutated form of the gene.

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New UC Project Finds Roadmap to Improve Patient Safety in Radiation Exposure

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Colon cancer patients who have a healthy body weight, exercise regularly and eat a diet high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables have a significantly lower risk of cancer recurrence or death, according to a research team led by UC San Francisco investigators. This finding represents an analysis of data collected on patients participating in a national study for people with stage III colon cancer.