By Cindy Perettie, CEO, Foundation Medicine The way ASCO started for me this year set the scene for what was an inspiring and fascinating weekend. Early on Friday morning, before most people’s ASCOs had started, I sat in a meeting room in the conference center watching it slowly fill to…

The deletion of the ataxia-telangiectasia group D-complementing (Atdc) gene, whose human homolog is up-regulated in the majority of pancreatic cancer cases, completely prevents the development of tumors in mice, according to new research published in the journal Genes & Development. “We found that deleting the ATDC gene in pancreatic cells resulted…

A consortium of researchers from top-tier cancer centers, as well as from Illumina and Grail, has published a study showing that their new liquid biopsy method of determining the sequence of molecules in DNA can detect small fragments of cancerous genetic material in blood samples from lung cancer patients with…

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the US, with a 5- year survival rate of only 19%.  Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center hope to dramatically improve these statistics with a novel combination therapy, targeting a newly discovered Achilles heel of aggressive…

Biocept said today it will partner with Providence St. Joseph Health, Southern California and its wholly-owned affiliates—Providence Saint John’s Health Center and the John Wayne Cancer Institute—on a study designed to validate the use of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as a specimen type with Biocept's Target Selector liquid biopsy platform in…

Researchers at the Salk Institute report they might have solved the long-standing mystery around how the protein complex AMPK can both hinder and help cancer. The lab of Reuben Shaw, Ph.D., director of the Salk Cancer Center and the paper’s senior author, showed that late-stage cancers can trigger AMPK’s cellular…

Artificial intelligence has a way of inspiring wonder and uneasiness at the same time, particularly when it shows that it can outperform humans while hiding exactly how it goes about its business. The latest group of humans to be mysteriously surpassed by artificial intelligence, or AI, consists of pathologists—specifically, pathologists…

PLK1, or polo-like kinase 1, has long been implicated as an oncogene. Evidence, much of it circumstantial, has been accumulating against PLK1 for decades. New findings, however, indicate that PLK1 may have been misjudged all this time. According to researchers from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and the…

Sponsor: OmniSeq Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center subsidiary OmniSeq and LabCorp jointly launched OmniSeq Advance, a single test that combines targeted therapy and immuno-oncology biomarkers. The test is the first New York State CLEP-approved assay to combine next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based comprehensive genomic profiling, tumor mutational burden (TMB) and microsatellite status…

Testicular germ cell tumors (TGCTs) are one of the most common type of cancer in young men of European descent and are considered to be among the most curable. Researchers for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network now report on the results of a comprehensive genetic and epigenetic analysis…

Biocept said today it will become Thermo Fisher Scientific’s “Center of Excellence” for oncology-focused liquid biopsy efforts as part of a commercial collaboration whose value was not disclosed—months after a research alliance between the companies yielded promising results. The collaboration will begin with the companies partnering to validate Thermo Fisher's…

Understanding the appropriate balance of “good” bacteria within the intestinal tract has been the focus of much ongoing research for a number of years. Links between gut dysbiosis and the onset of disease are continually being established with the hope that therapeutic interventions may be developed soon to halt disease…

When cells go astray and stagger toward malignant fates, they leave behind the molecular equivalent of footprints. Some of the most telling footprints may be found along transcriptional pathways, but if the missteps are to be identified, they need to be distinguished from all the other molecular traces criss-crossing the…

In a cancer as aggressive as pancreatic cancer, the roots of malignancy presumably run deep. Yet these roots are hard to trace. Nonetheless, persistent digging by scientists based at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has uncovered mutational events that occur early in pancreatic cancer and explain how it eventually…

The College of American Pathologists (CAP), the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), and the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP)—have updated their 2013 evidence-based guideline for the testing and treatment of patients with tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). The new guideline reflects the rapid pace of change in…