The U.S. Supreme Court set aside a ruling by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals about the Myriad Genetics patents of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and sent the case back to the lower court for further review.
Seven types of human tumors transplanted into mice shrank or disappeared when scientists treated the animals with a single antibody that masks the CD47 protein, which protects cancer cells from macrophages and other immune cells. The anti-CD47 antibody treatment also blocked metastasis by highly aggressive tumors (PNAS published online 2012 Mar 26).
Roche's antibody–drug conjugate trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) showed positive phase III results for progression-free survival among women with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer who had previously received treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin; Genentech) and a taxane.
South Korea's National Center for Cancer Genomics is launching a collaborative project to analyze breast cancer in Asian women.
The NIH's new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and Lilly Research Laboratories (Indianapolis, IN) have agreed that the NCATS Pharmaceutical Collection of 3,800 approved and investigational medicines will be screened with Lilly's Phenotypic Drug Discovery panel, designed to reveal novel mechanisms or pathways of potential medicines for cancer and other diseases. Results will be public at the NIH website at http://tripod.nih.gov/npc.
“Data suggest that research participants and the public want and expect return of individual research results and incidental findings, yet research practice has been not to return them,” said Susan Wolf, JD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis during a discussion at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting in Chicago in April. “We as a scientific community are going to have to deal with this.”
In today's cancer research, “most biomarker hypotheses are wrong,” Mark Ratain, MD, of the University of Chicago School of Medicine told a session at the AACR Annual Meeting 2012. “The field is filled with false discovery.”
For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://CDnews.aacrjournals.org.
