Cancer News, Treatment and Research

A group of researchers from Brigham Young University (BYU) and the University of Iowa say they’ve identified a specific gene that can be studied to help predict a cancer patient’s chance of surviving their disease. According to a story aired on Utah’s KSL-TV, the team from the two universities found that a “handful of genes” in a tumor can predict how the cancer will progress and may even assist in predicting how the patient will respond to treatment as that cancer progresses. BYU biology professor David Bearss and colleagues conducted their study on a group of 19 multiple myeloma patients. They took biopsied cell samples throughout their treatment and, according to Bearss, looked at them on a genetic level, attempting to understand what happens to those cells during treatment. What the team found was that certain genes consistently changed as the patients became more resistant to therapy. One gene, dubbed NEK2, appeared to be a predictor of poor therapy response among the multiple myeloma patients. Bearss called this a huge breakthrough and another step on the way to making better decisions about cancer treatment. “(This) might change how we treat patients that have those markers. We might be a little bit more aggressive early-on because we know that their outcome might not be as good as other patients who don’t have those markers,” Bearss said. While the patients for this study were limited to those with just one type of cancer, Bearrs noted that the effects of the gene set also apply to a number of other types of the disease including breast cancer, ovarian cancer and lung cancer . He said there seems to be a common mechanism that cancer cells use to resist drugs. “What we’re really interested in today is to figure how to more personalize medicine,” Bearss stressed. “Make it so when you walk in the door, we’re not just treating you out of a book, but we try to look at your specific tumor and say, ‘What is it specifically that your cancer is expressing?’”