Medical, Cancer | featured news

Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer. The investments are based on the belief that the medical establishment is moving toward the routine sequencing of every patient’s genome in the quest for “precision medicine,” a course for prevention and treatment based on the special, even unique characteristics of the patient’s genes.

A comprehensive study of the genetics of a common lung cancer finds that more than half the tumors have mutations that might be treated by drugs that are already in the pipeline or that could be developed.

How can a cancer come back after it’s apparently been eradicated? Three new studies are bolstering a long-debated idea: that tumors contain their own pool of stem cells that can multiply and keep fueling the cancer, seeding regrowth.

Doctors have successfully dropped the first "smart bomb" on breast cancer, using a drug to deliver a toxic payload to tumor cells while leaving healthy ones alone.

Medical science efforts to harness the power of the immune system against cancer are beginning to bear fruit after decades of frustration, opening up a hopeful new front in the long battle against the disease.

Whether the most technologically advanced way to check for colon cancer will become the standard screening method of the future does not appear to be a slam-dunk. The method, known as virtual colonoscopy, combines X-ray and computer technology to create three-dimensional views of the full length of the colon, the large intestine. It allows doctors to look for polyps, or pre-cancerous growths, or other signs of cancer or other intestinal disease. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, virtual colonoscopy can be done with computed tomography (called a CT or CAT scan) or with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

What's killing us? For decades, global health leaders have focused on diseases that can spread - AIDS, tuberculosis, new flu bugs. They pushed for vaccines, better treatments and other ways to control germs that were only a plane ride away from seeding outbreaks anywhere in the world....

With a little training, your dog could have a promising future as a biochemist. A new study in the European Respitory Journal shows that dogs are better at sniffing out the early markers of lung cancer than the latest medical technologies at our disposal. Lung cancer is the second most frequent form of cancer in ...

Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia - turning the patients' own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells....

A new drug combination can help patients with pancreatic cancer live months longer than on standard therapy.