• Detailed analysis of 99 tumors from patients with early pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma defined 16 significantly mutated genes, including novel mutated genes involved in chromatin modification and DNA damage repair (Nature 2012;491:399–405).

  • The UK Research Partnership Investment Fund is awarding 2 major grants for research to the University of Oxford and various academic, industry, hospital, and philanthropic partners. One project will establish a €138-million center to develop, test, and implement personalized treatments, diagnosis, imaging, and therapy for patients with early-stage cancer. The other, a new program for drug target discovery, will be funded at €32 million.

  • Daily use of a common multivitamin reduced the risk for total cancer occurrence by 8% in a population of men followed for more than a decade, in an analysis of Physicians' Health Study II results presented at the American Association for Cancer Research International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research in October in Anaheim, CA.

  • The National Cancer Institute (NCI) gave the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center a $28.4-million 5-year grant and renewed its designation as a Comprehensive Cancer Center. The University said that it has received the most NCI funding among U.S. academic medical centers, with the Cancer Center receiving a total of $79 million in 2011.

  • Biotechnology tools company Life Technologies of Carlsbad, CA, is buying cancer bioinformatics firm Compendia Bioscience of Ann Arbor, MI. Compendia's Oncomine cloud-based analytics tool integrates high-throughput cancer profiling data across a large volume of cancer types to aid in finding correlations among genetic signatures, clinical status, and drug response markers.

  • A study of 1,274 patients across the United States revealed that 69% of patients with advanced lung cancer and 81% of patients with advanced colorectal cancer did not understand that the chemotherapy they were receiving was unlikely to cure their disease (N Engl J Med 2012;367:1616–25).

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.