PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. – There’s encouraging news in the effort to fight chemotherapy resistance in patients with triple-negative breast cancer.
Dr. Aurelio Castrellon, an oncologist with Memorial Healthcare, said a lab-based study found pathways to block an enzyme involved in this particular form of breast cancer.
“They actually identified a small molecule that is able to fit perfectly at the site of the enzyme and block it in a way that cancer cells will not proliferate in the medium where this is added, and they very elegantly demonstrated this with rats where they can see that there is cell death where this is added to the cell lines,” he said.
The findings are important because 70% of women with triple-negative breast cancer develop resistance to treatment.
Sunlight and kidney disease
A recent joint study between the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and the University of Washington is shedding more light on a possible link between sunlight exposure and kidney disease in people with Lupus.
Previous research has established that in up to 80% of patients with Lupus, sunlight exposure can trigger both local skin inflammation and systemic flare-ups, including kidney disease.
In this latest study, researchers identified specific markers of inflammation that cause injury to the skin, the blood, and the kidneys following UV exposure in mice.
Researchers underscored that normal, healthy mice exposed to UV light did not get the type of kidney disease seen in lupus patients.