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Theses & Dissertations: Cancer Research

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

Novel Spirocyclic Dimer (SpiD3) Displays Potent Preclinical Effects in Hematological Malignancies , Alexandria Eiken

Chemotherapy-Induced Modulation of Tumor Antigen Presentation , Alaina C. Larson

Understanding the role of MASTL in colon homeostasis and colitis-associated cancer development , Kristina Pravoverov

Dying Right: Supporting Anti-Cancer Therapy Through Immunogenic Cell Death , Elizabeth Schmitz

Therapeutic Effects of BET Protein Inhibition in B-cell Malignancies and Beyond , Audrey L. Smith

Targeting KSR1 to inhibit stemness and therapy resistance , Heidi M. Vieira

Identifying the Molecular Determinants of Lung Metastatic Adaptation in Prostate Cancer , Grace M. Waldron

Identification of Mitotic Phosphatases and Cyclin K as Novel Molecular Targets in Pancreatic Cancer , Yi Xiao

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Development of Combination Therapy Strategies to Treat Cancer Using Dihydroorotate Dehydrogenase Inhibitors , Nicholas Mullen

Overcoming Resistance Mechanisms to CDK4/6 Inhibitor Treatment Using CDK6-Selective PROTAC , Sarah Truong

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Omics Analysis in Cancer and Development , Emalie J. Clement

Investigating the Role of Splenic Macrophages in Pancreatic Cancer , Daisy V. Gonzalez

Polymeric Chloroquine in Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer Therapy , Rubayat Islam Khan

Evaluating Targets and Therapeutics for the Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer , Shelby M. Knoche

Characterization of 1,1-Diarylethylene FOXM1 Inhibitors Against High-Grade Serous Ovarian Carcinoma Cells , Cassie Liu

Novel Mechanisms of Protein Kinase C α Regulation and Function , Xinyue Li

SOX2 Dosage Governs Tumor Cell Identity and Proliferation , Ethan P. Metz

Post-Transcriptional Control of the Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) in Ras-Driven Colorectal Cancers , Chaitra Rao

Use of Machine Learning Algorithms and Highly Multiplexed Immunohistochemistry to Perform In-Depth Characterization of Primary Pancreatic Tumors and Metastatic Sites , Krysten Vance

Characterization of Metastatic Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma in the Immunosuppressed Patient , Megan E. Wackel

Visceral adipose tissue remodeling in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cachexia: the role of activin A signaling , Pauline Xu

Phos-Tag-Based Screens Identify Novel Therapeutic Targets in Ovarian Cancer and Pancreatic Cancer , Renya Zeng

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Functional Characterization of Cancer-Associated DNA Polymerase ε Variants , Stephanie R. Barbari

Pancreatic Cancer: Novel Therapy, Research Tools, and Educational Outreach , Ayrianne J. Crawford

Apixaban to Prevent Thrombosis in Adult Patients Treated With Asparaginase , Krishna Gundabolu

Molecular Investigation into the Biologic and Prognostic Elements of Peripheral T-cell Lymphoma with Regulators of Tumor Microenvironment Signaling Explored in Model Systems , Tyler Herek

Utilizing Proteolysis-Targeting Chimeras to Target the Transcriptional Cyclin-Dependent Kinases 9 and 12 , Hannah King

Insights into Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma Pathogenesis and Metastasis Using a Bedside-to-Bench Approach , Marissa Lobl

Development of a MUC16-Targeted Near-Infrared Antibody Probe for Fluorescence-Guided Surgery of Pancreatic Cancer , Madeline T. Olson

FGFR4 glycosylation and processing in cholangiocarcinoma promote cancer signaling , Andrew J. Phillips

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Cooperativity of CCNE1 and FOXM1 in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer , Lucy Elge

Characterizing the critical role of metabolic and redox homeostasis in colorectal cancer , Danielle Frodyma

Genomic and Transcriptomic Alterations in Metabolic Regulators and Implications for Anti-tumoral Immune Response , Ryan J. King

Dimers of Isatin Derived Spirocyclic NF-κB Inhibitor Exhibit Potent Anticancer Activity by Inducing UPR Mediated Apoptosis , Smit Kour

From Development to Therapy: A Panoramic Approach to Further Our Understanding of Cancer , Brittany Poelaert

The Cellular Origin and Molecular Drivers of Claudin-Low Mammary Cancer , Patrick D. Raedler

Mitochondrial Metabolism as a Therapeutic Target for Pancreatic Cancer , Simon Shin

Development of Fluorescent Hyaluronic Acid Nanoparticles for Intraoperative Tumor Detection , Nicholas E. Wojtynek

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

The role of E3 ubiquitin ligase FBXO9 in normal and malignant hematopoiesis , R. Willow Hynes-Smith

BRCA1 & CTDP1 BRCT Domainomics in the DNA Damage Response , Kimiko L. Krieger

Targeted Inhibition of Histone Deacetyltransferases for Pancreatic Cancer Therapy , Richard Laschanzky

Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) Class I Molecule Components and Amyloid Precursor-Like Protein 2 (APLP2): Roles in Pancreatic Cancer Cell Migration , Bailee Sliker

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

FOXM1 Expression and Contribution to Genomic Instability and Chemoresistance in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer , Carter J. Barger

Overcoming TCF4-Driven BCR Signaling in Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma , Keenan Hartert

Functional Role of Protein Kinase C Alpha in Endometrial Carcinogenesis , Alice Hsu

Functional Signature Ontology-Based Identification and Validation of Novel Therapeutic Targets and Natural Products for the Treatment of Cancer , Beth Neilsen

Elucidating the Roles of Lunatic Fringe in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma , Prathamesh Patil

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Metabolic Reprogramming of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Cells in Response to Chronic Low pH Stress , Jaime Abrego

Understanding the Relationship between TGF-Beta and IGF-1R Signaling in Colorectal Cancer , Katie L. Bailey

The Role of EHD2 in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Tumorigenesis and Progression , Timothy A. Bielecki

Perturbing anti-apoptotic proteins to develop novel cancer therapies , Jacob Contreras

Role of Ezrin in Colorectal Cancer Cell Survival Regulation , Premila Leiphrakpam

Evaluation of Aminopyrazole Analogs as Cyclin-Dependent Kinase Inhibitors for Colorectal Cancer Therapy , Caroline Robb

Identifying the Role of Janus Kinase 1 in Mammary Gland Development and Breast Cancer , Barbara Swenson

DNMT3A Haploinsufficiency Provokes Hematologic Malignancy of B-Lymphoid, T-Lymphoid, and Myeloid Lineage in Mice , Garland Michael Upchurch

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

EHD1 As a Positive Regulator of Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor-1 Receptor , Luke R. Cypher

Inflammation- and Cancer-Associated Neurolymphatic Remodeling and Cachexia in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma , Darci M. Fink

Role of CBL-family Ubiquitin Ligases as Critical Negative Regulators of T Cell Activation and Functions , Benjamin Goetz

Exploration into the Functional Impact of MUC1 on the Formation and Regulation of Transcriptional Complexes Containing AP-1 and p53 , Ryan L. Hanson

DNA Polymerase Zeta-Dependent Mutagenesis: Molecular Specificity, Extent of Error-Prone Synthesis, and the Role of dNTP Pools , Olga V. Kochenova

Defining the Role of Phosphorylation and Dephosphorylation in the Regulation of Gap Junction Proteins , Hanjun Li

Molecular Mechanisms Regulating MYC and PGC1β Expression in Colon Cancer , Jamie L. McCall

Pancreatic Cancer Invasion of the Lymphatic Vasculature and Contributions of the Tumor Microenvironment: Roles for E-selectin and CXCR4 , Maria M. Steele

Altered Levels of SOX2, and Its Associated Protein Musashi2, Disrupt Critical Cell Functions in Cancer and Embryonic Stem Cells , Erin L. Wuebben

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Characterization and target identification of non-toxic IKKβ inhibitors for anticancer therapy , Elizabeth Blowers

Effectors of Ras and KSR1 dependent colon tumorigenesis , Binita Das

Characterization of cancer-associated DNA polymerase delta variants , Tony M. Mertz

A Role for EHD Family Endocytic Regulators in Endothelial Biology , Alexandra E. J. Moffitt

Biochemical pathways regulating mammary epithelial cell homeostasis and differentiation , Chandrani Mukhopadhyay

EPACs: epigenetic regulators that affect cell survival in cancer. , Catherine Murari

Role of the C-terminus of the Catalytic Subunit of Translesion Synthesis Polymerase ζ (Zeta) in UV-induced Mutagensis , Hollie M. Siebler

LGR5 Activates TGFbeta Signaling and Suppresses Metastasis in Colon Cancer , Xiaolin Zhou

LGR5 Activates TGFβ Signaling and Suppresses Metastasis in Colon Cancer , Xiaolin Zhou

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Genetic dissection of the role of CBL-family ubiquitin ligases and their associated adapters in epidermal growth factor receptor endocytosis , Gulzar Ahmad

Strategies for the identification of chemical probes to study signaling pathways , Jamie Leigh Arnst

Defining the mechanism of signaling through the C-terminus of MUC1 , Roger B. Brown

Targeting telomerase in human pancreatic cancer cells , Katrina Burchett

The identification of KSR1-like molecules in ras-addicted colorectal cancer cells , Drew Gehring

Mechanisms of regulation of AID APOBEC deaminases activity and protection of the genome from promiscuous deamination , Artem Georgievich Lada

Characterization of the DNA-biding properties of human telomeric proteins , Amanda Lakamp-Hawley

Studies on MUC1, p120-catenin, Kaiso: coordinate role of mucins, cell adhesion molecules and cell cycle players in pancreatic cancer , Xiang Liu

Epac interaction with the TGFbeta PKA pathway to regulate cell survival in colon cancer , Meghan Lynn Mendick

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Deconvolution of the phosphorylation patterns of replication protein A by the DNA damage response to breaks , Kerry D. Brader

Modeling malignant breast cancer occurrence and survival in black and white women , Michael Gleason

The role of dna methyltransferases in myc-induced lymphomagenesis , Ryan A. Hlady

Design and development of inhibitors of CBL (TKB)-protein interactions , Eric A. Kumar

Pancreatic cancer-associated miRNAs : expression, regulation and function , Ashley M. Mohr

Mechanistic studies of mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP) , Xiaming Pang

Novel roles for JAK2/STAT5 signaling in mammary gland development, cancer, and immune dysregulation , Jeffrey Wayne Schmidt

Optimization of therapeutics against lethal pancreatic cancer , Joshua J. Souchek

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Immune-based novel diagnostic mechanisms for pancreatic cancer , Michael J. Baine

Sox2 associated proteins are essential for cell fate , Jesse Lee Cox

KSR2 regulates cellular proliferation, transformation, and metabolism , Mario R. Fernandez

Discovery of a novel signaling cross-talk between TPX2 and the aurora kinases during mitosis , Jyoti Iyer

Regulation of metabolism by KSR proteins , Paula Jean Klutho

The role of ERK 1/2 signaling in the dna damage-induced G2 , Ryan Kolb

Regulation of the Bcl-2 family network during apoptosis induced by different stimuli , Hernando Lopez

Studies on the role of cullin3 in mitosis , Saili Moghe

Characteristics of amyloid precursor-like protein 2 (APLP2) in pancreatic cancer and Ewing's sarcoma , Haley Louise Capek Peters

Structural and biophysical analysis of a human inosine triphosphate pyrophosphatase polymorphism , Peter David Simone

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List of 50+ Unique Cancer Dissertation Topics by Experts

Table of Content

Find Available Data

Look for a theoretical base for your topic, consult your mentor, participate in medical research surveys, take advantage of the available resources, ask questions that can be answered, read everything on the subject, check if the study was reviewed, check the results of your surveys, phases of new research, ask questions to your health care team.

Cancer is said to be one of the deadliest diseases and causes of death in the world. For a few years, it has received a lot of attention. Researchers and students are doing their studies and research to know more about the disease. Therefore, students often struggle with and look for one of the best cancer dissertation topics for writing their dissertation. 

It is essential to choose a topic that not only benefits your research but also helps the reader or the public in general. So, if you are thinking of writing a dissertation on cancer, then it is best to know how to research to get the best cancer dissertation ideas. 

How to Choose Cancer Dissertation Topics?

We know how difficult it is to choose a topic for a dissertation on cancer. Sometimes, more time is consumed while researching and choosing a topic than writing a dissertation. Therefore, nursing students often look for help from experts in such cases. However, those who choose to work on cancer research topics for their dissertation have to go through several things to find the right topic. 

Luckily, we have just the right information to provide  dissertation help  and make it easy for you to select a perfect topic. All you have to do is go through the below-mentioned pointers. 

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The first and foremost thing to do while choosing a topic is to look for easily available data. It is essential to look for reliable information when writing a dissertation on a disease. So choose a topic for which you can easily find all the information, or the data can be available conveniently.

One of the most important things to take care of while choosing a research topic for your dissertation on cancer is to check if your idea has a solid theoretical base. Because if your topic doesn't include a relevant theoretical basis, it will look vague and unauthentic to your reader. 

If you are sceptical about your decisions or topic selection. The best thing would be to seek  nursing dissertation help  from your professor or from experts. Your mentor can help you with planning to make it easy for you to choose a topic. They can also suggest the right resources or sources from where you can get enough information for your dissertation writing. So, never hesitate to seek help for unique cancer dissertation topics for your academic task.

Often, researchers take surveys to analyse data and get to a decision. Therefore, you can also do the same while choosing the right topic among various cancer dissertation ideas. When you participate in a medical research survey, you can get data analysis on various diseases of the same origin, like lung cancer, ovary cancer, breast cancer dissertation topics, and many more. 

Cancer is a vast topic. So, to narrow it down among several cancer dissertation topics, you have to look for available resources and sources. If you do not have relevant and efficient resources to start your dissertation, there is no sense in choosing that topic. It is rather better if you seek help from  dissertation writing services .

Your mentor can help you with planning to make it easy for you to choose cancer dissertation topics. They can also suggest the right resources or sources from where you can get enough information for your dissertation writing. Because if your topic doesn't include a relevant theoretical basis, it will look vague and unauthentic to your reader.

Well, reading all the details on the subject is essential before writing a dissertation on it. The reason is that if you don't, your knowledge will be incomplete, and it will get difficult for you to come up with an outcome or conclusion for your research. For example, you are selecting from breast cancer dissertation topics, but if you don't read everything about it. You will not be able to justify your arguments.

So, these ways can help you select the best cancer research topic for your dissertation. So, if you follow these tips, you can choose one of the best cancer dissertation topics for your academic task. But how will you ensure the authenticity and credibility of your research? Let's find out!

Explore Our FREE SAMPLES of Dissertations

How to Ensure the Reliability of Your Cancer Research? A Checklist

It is crucial to ensure that the things you have included in your dissertation or the research you have done on your cancer dissertation topics are reliable and relevant. Using correct and accurate data and information is vital when choosing a dissertation theme in the medical field or  nursing dissertation topics . So, to help you with that, we have developed a short checklist that you have to tick off for complete authenticity. 

Yes, it is essential to ensure that whatever sources or study you are taking reference from was peer-reviewed by the journal that has published them.

If you have used Surveys as your research method for choosing cancer dissertation topics. Go through your survey results and check how many people participated in the survey and how long it lasted. 

If you are studying and choosing any new treatments, analysis, therapies, or symptoms as a part of your cancer dissertation ideas. Ensure you go through all the study phases or take regular updates about the new research.

This is one of the most important steps to confirm the credibility of your cancer dissertation topics. Always ask your healthcare team or committee to clarify your doubts on the chosen topic. It will help you get the correct answers for your research.

So, this was the quick checklist you need to tick off while working on a dissertation on cancer or any other nursing and medical field. We know it is a very time-consuming process, so we are here to help you. Below is the list of cancer dissertation topics for undergraduates and postgraduates to help narrow your field and topic selection. 

Cancer Dissertation Topics for Undergraduates

1. Lung Cancer Pathophysiology

2. Breast Cancer: Literature Review

3. Cancer Insurance Evaluation

4. Case Brief on Colon Cancer and Colostomy

5. Environmentally and Lifestyle Linked Cancer

6. Skin Cancer Types, Cells of Origin

7. Wellness Programs for Colorectal Cancer

8. Addressing Risk Factors for Lung Cancer

9. Esophageal Cancer and Its Treatment

10. Breast Cancer: Research Review Paper

11. Genetic Alterations and Cancer

12. Breast Cancer: Threat to the Patients

13. Epidemiology of Breast Cancer in the UK

14. Does Marijuana Use and Misuse Cause Cancer?

15. Cancer Patients: The Effectiveness of Pain Diary

16. Health & Medicine: Breast Cancer in XIX Century

17. The Relationship Between Breast Cancer and Genes

18. Approach to Cancer Care: Diagnosing and Treatment

19. Passive Smoking and Pancreatic Cancer in Women

20. How to Lower your Cancer Risk. Nutrition Action Health Letter

21. Cancer Biology: Oncogenes and Tumor Suppressor Genes

22. Breast Cancer: Preventive Measures and Support Methods

23. Discuss the Latest Technologies Used for Cancer Treatments

24. Prostate Cancer Among Blacks in Maryland: Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

25. Post-operative Breast Cancer Patients With Depression: Annotated Bibliography

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Cancer Dissertation Topics for Postgraduates

26. Deathography of Cancer

27. DNA Methylation in Cancer Therapy

28. Precision Therapy in Colorectal Cancer

29. Possible Trends in the Cause of Cancer

30. Skin Cancer: Examination and Prevention

31. Socioeconomic Factors of Oral Cancer

32. Omics Analysis in Cancer and Development

33. Cancer and Humor in Children: Approach to Research

34. The Role of Immunotherapy in Urothelial Cancer

35. Precision Medicine in Cancer Treatment

36. Methods For Screening For Cervical Cancer

37. Cancer Burden And Prevention Methods

38. Advances in Immunotherapy in Pediatric Solid Tumors

39. The Benefits Of Music Therapy For Breast Cancer Patients

40. Polymeric Chloroquine in Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer Therapy

41. Cancer Care Approaches: Diagnosis, Side Effects, and Treatment

42. Approaches to Illustrate Tumor Immune Microenvironment

43. Physical and Mental Care for Cancer Patients

44. Cancer Diagnostics, Staging and Complications

45. Pain Management Issues in Cancer Patients

46. Depression in Female Cancer Patients and Survivors

47. Cancer Pain Management and Education Programs

48. Cancer Metabolism: Diagnosis, Research, Effects

49. Type C Personality as a Risk Factor for Cancer

50. Nutritional "Cures" for Clients With Cancer 

51. American Cancer Society: The Aspects of Melanoma

52. Virtual Colonoscopy to Screen for Colon Cancer

53. Immune Cell Metabolic Reprogramming in Cancer Development and Therapy

54. Interplay Between Tumor Immunology and Tumor Micro-environment

55. Application of Multi-omics Analysis in Thoracic Cancer Immunotherapy

So, these were some of the best cancer dissertation ideas for undergraduate and postgraduate nursing students. It will save you time spent on topic selection. Moreover, you can also find samples of dissertation  on our Global Assignment Help website. It will help you understand how do you have to write a dissertation once the topic is decided. However, if you still feel the need of assistance, you can always turn to our experts for guidance.

Still Searching for a Perfect Cancer Dissertation Topic? Ask Us!

Are you still indecisive about your cancer research topic? Do you need help with it? Well, then what are we here for? Do not feel alone as we will guide you anywhere you get stuck. Our experts will not only help you with topic selection but with any part of your dissertation separately or completely. We can even suggest you more topics based on your personalised requirements.

You can even buy dissertation service  from us, and we will ensure that you get full satisfaction. Moreover, if by any chance, you find any mistake in the document submitted by our experts. You should know that we offer 100% free revisions. All you have to do is contact our customer support staff and raise your query. They will help you get several suggestion for your cancer dissertation topics to completing it for you. Whatever you need, try seeking our help, today!

Also Read:  List of 50+ Best Epidemiology Dissertation Topics

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UKnowledge > College of Medicine > Toxicology and Cancer Biology > Theses & Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations--Toxicology and Cancer Biology

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

UNDERSTANDING THE MECHANISM OF FERROPTOSIS SUSCEPTIBILITY VARIATION IN COLORECTAL CANCER , Aziza Alshahrani

Elucidation of Mismatch Repair Regulation by ABL1: Advantages/Disadvantages of Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Treatment , Hannah Daniels

PORCUPINE’S ROLE IN THE ENHANCEMENT OF ENZALUTAMIDE EFFICACY IN DRUG RESISTANT PROSTATE CANCER , Katelyn Jones

ACQUIRED TREATMENT RESISTANCE IN PROSTATE CANCER VIA THE PRODUCTION OF RADIATION DERIVED EXTRACELLULAR VESICLES CONTAINING MITOCHONDRIAL PROTEINS , Caitlin Miller

Delineating Contributions of Genotype and Lineage to Lung Cancer Therapy Response , Kassandra Jo Naughton

THE CRITICAL ROLE OF NAC1 IN TRIPLE-NEGATIVE BREAST CANCER STEMNESS AND IMMUNOSUPPRESSION , chrispus ngule

THERAPEUTIC APPROACHES AND NOVEL MECHANSIMS IN CANCER PROGRESSION , Kendall Simpson

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

ELUCIDATING THE FUNCTIONAL IMPORTANCE OF PEROXIREDOXIN IV IN PROSTATE CANCER AND ITS SECRETION MECHANISM , Na Ding

Targeting EZH2 to Improve Outcomes of Lung Squamous Cell Carcinoma , Tanner DuCote

UNDERSTANDING AND TARGETING THE TPH1-SEROTONIN-HTR3A AXIS IN SMALL CELL LUNG CANCER , Yanning Hao

CONSERVED NOVEL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN POST-REPLICATIVE REPAIR AND MISMATCH REPAIR PROTEINS HAVE DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS ON DNA REPAIR PATHWAYS , Anna K. Miller

UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF PEROXIREDOXIN IV IN COLORECTAL CANCER DEVELOPMENT , Pratik Thapa

BEYOND MITOSIS, PLK1-MEDIATED PHOSPHORYLATION RE-WIRES CANCER METABOLISM AND PROMOTES CANCER PROGRESSION , Qiongsi Zhang

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

ELUCIDATING THE ROLE OF POLYCOMB REPRESSIVE COMPLEX 2 IN LUNG STEM CELL FATE AND LUNG DISEASE , Aria Byrd

SEX DIMORPHISM IN HEMATOPOIESIS AND BONE MARROW NICHE , xiaojing cui

EXTRACELLULAR VESICLES AND CANCER THERAPY: AN INSIGHT INTO THE ROLE OF OXIDATIVE STRESS , Jenni Ho

OVERCOMING RESISTANCE TO SG-ARIS IN CASTRATION-RESISTANT PROSTATE CANCER , Chaohao Li

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

THE TUMOR SUPPRESSOR PAR-4 REGULATES HYPERTROPHIC OBESITY , Nathalia Araujo

Epigenetic States Regulate Tumor Aggressiveness and Response to Targeted Therapies in Lung Adenocarcinoma , Fan Chen

DELINEATING THE ROLE OF FATTY ACID METABOLISM TO IMPROVE THERAPEUTIC STRATEGIES FOR COLORECTAL CANCER , James Drury

DEVELOPMENT OF TOOLS FOR ATOM-LEVEL INTERPRETATION OF STABLE ISOTOPE-RESOLVED METABOLOMICS DATASETS , Huan Jin

MECHANISMS OF CADMIUM-INDUCED AND EPIDERMAL GROWTH FACTOR RECEPTOR MUTATION-DRIVEN LUNG TUMORIGENESIS , Hsuan-Pei Lin

SCIENCE-BASED REGULATION OF PHARMACOLOGICAL SUBSTANCES IN COMPETITION HORSES , Jacob Machin

A NOVEL ROLE FOR NEUROTENSIN IN REGULATION OF STEM CELL FUNCTION IN THE SMALL INTESTINE , Stephanie Rock

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Home > School of Medicine > Cancer Biology > Dissertations

Cancer Biology Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2022 2022.

Characterizing The Post-Translational Modifications Of The Pro-Oncogenic Type Ii Transmembrane Serine Protease Tmprss13 , Carly Elizabeth Martin

Xpo1 As A Therapeutic Target In Gastric Cancer , Rachel Sexton

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Therapeutic Dual-Targeting Of Cytosolic And Mitochondrial One-Carbon Metabolism , Aamod Sanjeev Dekhne

Clinical Significance, Functional Role And Molecular Mechanism Of 2’-O-Methyltransferase Ftsj3 In Promoting Cancer Progression , Morenci Manning-Powell

Pak4-Nampt Dual Inhibition As A Novel Strategy For Therapy Resistant Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors , Gabriel Benyomo Mpilla

Targeting Metabolic Vulnerabilities In Epithelial Ovarian Cancer Via Folate Transporters , Adrianne Wallace-Povirk

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

The Role Of Bca2 In Regulation Of Warburg-Like Glucose And Lactate Metabolism In Breast Cancer Cell Lines , Richard T. Arkwright Iii

Apobec3 Enzymes Mediate Efficacy Of Cisplatin And Carboplatin Through The Activation Of Base Excision Repair And Mismatch Repair , Kayla Conner

Evaluation Of Autoantibodies To Paraneoplastic Antigens As Early Detection Biomarkers For High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer , Laura Catherine Hurley

A Novel Target Of Hdac6’s E3 Ubiquitin Ligase Activity, Chk1, Is Responsible For The Sensitization Of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Cells To Ionizing Radiation , Niko Moses

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Sprouty4 Is A Negative Regulator Of Erk/mapk Signaling In Breast Cancer And Plays A Role In The Transition From In Situ To Invasive Disease , Ethan Brock

Novel Insights Into The Use Of Ercc1 As A Biomarker For Response To Platinum-Based Chemotherapy In Lung Cancer , Joshua Ryan Heyza

Strategies To Enhance The Anti-Leukemic Activity Of Venetoclax (abt-199) In Aml Through Targeting Of Mcl-1 , Daniel Luedtke

Utilizing Immunopet To Measure Tumor Response To Treatment In Breast Cancer , Brooke Mcknight

Investigation Of The Role For Methyl-Cpg Binding Protein 2 Variant Mbd2_v2 In Cancer Stem Cells And Obesity-Associated Cancers , Emily A. Teslow

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Identifying The Role Of The Type-Ii Transmembrane Serine Protease Tmprss13 In Breast Cancer , Andrew Stevan Murray

Characterizing Novel Radiologic And Pathologic Tissue-Based Risk Factors For Breast Cancer In African American Women With Benign Breast Disease , Asra N. Shaik

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Pet Imaging Of Early Therapeutic Response In Solid Tumors , Stephanie J. Blocker

The Effects Of Bone Marrow Adipocytes On Metabolic Regulation In Metastatic Prostate Cancer , Jonathan Diedrich

Preparation And Utility Of Polymeric Nanoparticles For The Delivery Of Sirna As Cancer Therapy , Daniel Paul Feldmann

Functional Analysis Of Rad6 In Brca1 Wild Type And Brca1 Mutant Triple Negative Breast Cancer Drug Response , Brittany Haynes

Clinicopathology And Molecular Determinants Underlying Benign Breast And Breast Cancer Lesions , Andreana Holowatyj Holowatyj

Folate Receptor Alpha Targeted Delivery And Characterization Of Polyethyleneimine-Graft-Polycaprolactone-Block-Poly(ethylene Glycol) Containing Sirna Micelleplexes , Steven Jones

Mechanisms Of Hormonal Regulation Of Invasiveness And Metastasis Of Luminal Breast Cancer , Thomas Mcfall

New Mechanism Based Approaches For Treating Prostate Cancer , Rayna Rosati

Functions Of Atr/mec1 In Meiosis And The Cell Cycle , Layne Weatherford

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Identifying Mechanisms Of Resistance And Potential Therapeutic Targets For Pediatric Acute Myeloid Leukemia , John Timothy Caldwell

Whsc1l1 Regulates Estrogen Receptor Activity In Sum44 Breast Cancer Cells , Jonathan Curtis Irish

Imaging Anti-Proliferative Compounds With Flt-Pet , Christopher Mchugh

Loss Of Rap1gap: A Driver In The Progression From Dcis Of The Breast To Idc , Seema Shah

Structural Characterization And Therapeutic Utility Of The Proton-Coupled Folate Transporter , Michael Roy Wilson

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Therapeutic Targeting Of Bmp2 In Nf1-Deficient Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumors (mpnsts) , Sidra Ahsan

Hrd1 Partners In Endoplasmic Reticulum-Associated Degradation , Aaron Alexander Burr

Adipocyte-Induced Inflammation In Prostate Tumor Progression In Bone: Role Of Cxcr2 And Osteopontin , Aimalie Lynnette Hardaway

The Therapeutic Targeting Of Folate Receptor Alpha Positive Tumors Via Folate Receptor Selective Novel 5- And 6- Substituted Pyrrolo [2,3-D]pyrimidine Antifolates" , Shermaine Kimberly Mitchell-Ryan

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

The Tumor-Suppressive Role Of Secreted Maspin Via The Exosomes , Ivory Dean

Combating Resistance To Epidermal Growth Factor Recpetor Inhibitors In Triple Negative Breast Cancer , Julie Marie Madden

Tmprss2-Erg Regulation Of Androgen Biosynthetic Enzyme Expression, Dht Synthesis, And Androgen Receptor Activation In Prostate Cancer , Katelyn Ann Powell

Pathway Profiling Of Replicative And Induced Senescence , Maggie Purcell

Molecular Studies On The Anti-Tumor Effects Of Metal-Based Complexes: Involvement Of The Ubiquitin-Proteasome And Apoptotic Pathways , Sara M. Schmitt

A Novel Function For 12-Lipoxygenase In C-Met And Integrin β4 Axis Crosstalk , Elizabeth Tovar

Matriptase Mediated C-Met Signaling In Breast Cancer , Gina Lynn Zoratti

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

The Bca2 And Ampk Paradigm: Unraveling The Cancer Connection , Daniela (buac) Ventro

Expression And Regulation Of Map Kinase Phosphatases 1 And 2 In Breast Cancer Tamoxifen Sensitivity , Kelly Haagenson

Acidic Pericellular Ph: Effects On Proteolysis And Gene Expression As Determined In 3d Models Of Breast Carcinoma , Jennifer M. Rothberg

Impact Of Cryoablation On Tumor Immunity , Jesse Veenstra

Analysis Of The Structure And Function Of A Timp-1/cd63 Complex And Its Relationship To An Mt1-Mmp/cd63 Complex , Richard B. Warner

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

The proton-coupled folate transporter: biology and therapeutic applications to cancer , Sita Desmoulin

Role Of Thromboxane Receptor-Alpha In Prostate Cancer Progression , Prasanna Ekambaram

A Role For Reactive Oxygen Species In Photodynamic Therapy , Michael Price

Hdm2 Small-Molecule Inhibitors For Therapeutic Intervention In B-Cell Lymphoma , Angela Sosin

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

Amphiregulin (areg) And Epidermal Growth Factor (egf): Disparate In Egfr Signaling And Trafficking , Andrea Jacqueline Baillo

Functional in vitro analyses of lipid raft-associated cathepsin b: implication for the invasive phenotype of inflammatory breast cancer , Bernadette Caroline Victor

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Matriptase/pdgf D/beta-Pdgfr Signaling Axis In Human Prostate Cancer: The Role Of Pten In The Regulation Of Pdgf D Expression , M. Katie Conley-Lacomb

Regulatory And Functional Aspects Of Foxo3a Transcription Factor And Their Implications In Prostate Cancer , Melissa Elise Dobson

Molecular Mechanisms Of Pressure-Stimulated Cancer Cell Signaling , Christina Downey

Activation Of Tumor Cell Death Program By Targeting The Ubiquitin-Proteasome Pathway: Significance In Cancer Treatment And Prevention , Michael Joseph Frezza

Molecular And Therapeutic Implications Of Notch1 Signaling In Pediatric T-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia , Amanda Larson Gedman

Creg1 And Its Enhancement Of P16ink4a-Induced Senescence , Benchamart Moolmuang

Theses/Dissertations from 2000 2000

Proteasome inhibitor induced apoptosis in THP-1 cells , Catheryne. Chen

Neutropenia : In Vitro Predictions of In Vivo Endpoints , Kristan A. Keyes

Regulation of arachidonate 12-lipoxygenase and its role in tumor cell alpoptosis , Keqin. Tang

Differentiation of malignant human B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia , Nathan R. Wall

Theses/Dissertations from 1999 1999

Rac1-induced invasion : intracellular proteolysis of the extracellular matrix , Mamoun. Ahram

Structural and functional relationship of a galactoside-binding protein---galectin-3 , Hua Chang Gong

Tumor therapeutic response detected by nuclear magnetic resonance diffusion measurement , Zhanquan. He

Cathepsins B and D in human breast fibroblasts and epithelial/carcinoma cells , Jennifer E. Koblinski

A molecular biological study of the 3P- syndrome galectin-3 gene expression and the physical interaction between ER{45}R and P53 in breast cancer , Guozhen Liu

Theses/Dissertations from 1998 1998

Isolation and characterization of a common nuclear matrix protein and other studies , Tracy Sue Schwab

Theses/Dissertations from 1997 1997

Absolute tumor perfusion determined by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy : , Nicholas Edward Simpson

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At Memorial Sloan Kettering, scientific inquiry unites researchers with diverse expertise from across our academic programs and medical departments. Learn about some of our most intensively pursued topics of investigation.

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 RESEARCH PROJECT AND DISSERTATION

The dissertation is a 10,000 written thesis based on an extended research project which lasts throughout Trinity Term (your third term of study) and the Long Vacation.  This is a substantial piece of work and accounts for 40% of the total marks awarded for the MSc degree. 

The purpose of the dissertation and is to ensure that you have a good understanding of research practice and study design. The dissertation content is designed to assess you on your academic ability, critical thinking, originality and your understanding of the pragmatics of research.  Dissertations on this course are usually based on applied laboratory work, but other formats, such as computational work, or a systematic literature review, can be used where appropriate. 

For this project you will be embedded in one of the research laboratories within the University's Medical Sciences Division,  most usually within the Department of Oncology, or with one of our trusted industry partners. A list of dissertation projects and potential supervisors will be provided in Michaelmas term (October). You will need to discuss with potential supervisors and decide on a project by the January. There is no requirement to identify a project or supervisor before you apply to this course. 

After submission of the thesis, you will be required to present a scientific poster based on your work at the Master's Dissertation Showcase in September. This is a compulsory part of the course and counts towards your dissertation grade. 

Dissertation timeline: 

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Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > Molecular Biosciences > Theses and Dissertations

Molecular Biosciences Theses and Dissertations

Theses/dissertations from 2024 2024.

Androgen Drives Melanoma Invasiveness and Metastatic Spread by Inducing Tumorigenic Fucosylation , Qian Liu

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Exploring strain variation and bacteriophage predation in the gut microbiome of Ciona robusta , Celine Grace F. Atkinson

Distinct Nrf2 Signaling Thresholds Mediate Lung Tumor Initiation and Progression , Janine M. DeBlasi

Thermodynamic frustration of TAD2 and PRR contribute to autoinhibition of p53 , Emily Gregory

Utilization of Detonation Nanodiamonds: Nanocarrier for Gene Therapy in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer , Allan E. Gutierrez

Role of HLA-DRB1 Fucosylation in Anti-Melanoma Immunity , Daniel K. Lester

Targeting BET Proteins Downregulates miR-33a To Promote Synergy with PIM Inhibitors in CMML , Christopher T. Letson

Regulated Intramembrane Proteolysis by M82 Peptidases: The Role of PrsS in the Staphylococcus aureus Stress Response , Baylie M. Schott

Histone Deacetylase 8 is a Novel Therapeutic Target for Mantle Cell Lymphoma and Preserves Natural Killer Cell Cytotoxic Function , January M. Watters

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Regulation of the Heat Shock Response via Lysine Acetyltransferase CBP-1 and in Neurodegenerative Disease in Caenorhabditis elegans , Lindsey N. Barrett

Determining the Role of Dendritic Cells During Response to Treatment with Paclitaxel/Anti-TIM-3 , Alycia Gardner

Cell-free DNA Methylation Signatures in Cancer Detection and Classification , Jinyong Huang

The Role Of Eicosanoid Metabolism in Mammalian Wound Healing and Inflammation , Kenneth D. Maus

A Holistic Investigation of Acidosis in Breast Cancer , Bryce Ordway

Characterizing the Impact of Postharvest Temperature Stress on Polyphenol Profiles of Red and White-Fruited Strawberry Cultivars , Alyssa N. Smith

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

Multifaceted Approach to Understanding Acinetobacter baumannii Biofilm Formation and Drug Resistance , Jessie L. Allen

Cellular And Molecular Alterations Associated with Ovarian and Renal Cancer Pathophysiology , Ravneet Kaur Chhabra

Ecology and diversity of boletes of the southeastern United States , Arian Farid

CircREV1 Expression in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer , Meagan P. Horton

Microbial Dark Matter: Culturing the Uncultured in Search of Novel Chemotaxonomy , Sarah J. Kennedy

The Multifaceted Role of CCAR-1 in the Alternative Splicing and Germline Regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans , Doreen Ikhuva Lugano

Unraveling the Role of Novel G5 Peptidase Family Proteins in Virulence and Cell Envelope Biogenesis of Staphylococcus aureus , Stephanie M. Marroquin

Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding Protein 2 Alternative Splicing Regulates HIF1α During Chronic Hypoxia , Emily M. Mayo

Transcriptomic and Functional Investigation of Bacterial Biofilm Formation , Brooke R. Nemec

A Functional Characterization of the Omega (ω) subunit of RNA Polymerase in Staphylococcus aureus , Shrushti B. Patil

The Role Of Cpeb2 Alternative Splicing In TNBC Metastasis , Shaun C. Stevens

Screening Next-generation Fluorine-19 Probe and Preparation of Yeast-derived G Proteins for GPCR Conformation and Dynamics Study , Wenjie Zhao

Theses/Dissertations from 2020 2020

Understanding the Role of Cereblon in Hematopoiesis Through Structural and Functional Analyses , Afua Adutwumwa Akuffo

To Mid-cell and Beyond: Characterizing the Roles of GpsB and YpsA in Cell Division Regulation in Gram-positive Bacteria , Robert S. Brzozowski

Spatiotemporal Changes of Microbial Community Assemblages and Functions in the Subsurface , Madison C. Davis

New Mechanisms That Regulate DNA Double-Strand Break-Induced Gene Silencing and Genome Integrity , Dante Francis DeAscanis

Regulation of the Heat Shock Response and HSF-1 Nuclear Stress Bodies in C. elegans , Andrew Deonarine

New Mechanisms that Control FACT Histone Chaperone and Transcription-mediated Genome Stability , Angelo Vincenzo de Vivo Diaz

Targeting the ESKAPE Pathogens by Botanical and Microbial Approaches , Emily Dilandro

Succession in native groundwater microbial communities in response to effluent wastewater , Chelsea M. Dinon

Role of ceramide-1 phosphate in regulation of sphingolipid and eicosanoid metabolism in lung epithelial cells , Brittany A. Dudley

Allosteric Control of Proteins: New Methods and Mechanisms , Nalvi Duro

Microbial Community Structures in Three Bahamian Blue Holes , Meghan J. Gordon

A Novel Intramolecular Interaction in P53 , Fan He

The Impact of Myeloid-Mediated Co-Stimulation and Immunosuppression on the Anti-Tumor Efficacy of Adoptive T cell Therapy , Pasquale Patrick Innamarato

Investigating Mechanisms of Immune Suppression Secondary to an Inflammatory Microenvironment , Wendy Michelle Kandell

Posttranslational Modification and Protein Disorder Regulate Protein-Protein Interactions and DNA Binding Specificity of p53 , Robin Levy

Mechanistic and Translational Studies on Skeletal Malignancies , Jeremy McGuire

Novel Long Non-Coding RNA CDLINC Promotes NSCLC Progression , Christina J. Moss

Genome Maintenance Roles of Polycomb Transcriptional Repressors BMI1 and RNF2 , Anthony Richard Sanchez IV

The Ecology and Conservation of an Urban Karst Subterranean Estuary , Robert J. Scharping

Biological and Proteomic Characterization of Cornus officinalis on Human 1.1B4 Pancreatic β Cells: Exploring Use for T1D Interventional Application , Arielle E. Tawfik

Evaluation of Aging and Genetic Mutation Variants on Tauopathy , Amber M. Tetlow

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Investigating the Proteinaceous Regulome of the Acinetobacter baumannii , Leila G. Casella

Functional Characterization of the Ovarian Tumor Domain Deubiquitinating Enzyme 6B , Jasmin M. D'Andrea

Integrated Molecular Characterization of Lung Adenocarcinoma with Implications for Immunotherapy , Nicholas T. Gimbrone

The Role of Secreted Proteases in Regulating Disease Progression in Staphylococcus aureus , Brittney D. Gimza

Advanced Proteomic and Epigenetic Characterization of Ethanol-Induced Microglial Activation , Jennifer Guergues Guergues

Understanding immunometabolic and suppressive factors that impact cancer development , Rebecca Swearingen Hesterberg

Biochemical and Proteomic Approaches to Determine the Impact Level of Each Step of the Supply Chain on Tomato Fruit Quality , Robert T. Madden

Enhancing Immunotherapeutic Interventions for Treatment of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia , Kamira K. Maharaj

Characterization of the Autophagic-Iron Axis in the Pathophysiology of Endometriosis and Epithelial Ovarian Cancers , Stephanie Rockfield

Understanding the Influence of the Cancer Microenvironment on Metabolism and Metastasis , Shonagh Russell

Modeling of Interaction of Ions with Ether- and Ester-linked Phospholipids , Matthew W. Saunders

Novel Insights into the Multifaceted Roles of BLM in the Maintenance of Genome Stability , Vivek M. Shastri

Conserved glycine residues control transient helicity and disorder in the cold regulated protein, Cor15a , Oluwakemi Sowemimo

A Novel Cytokine Response Modulatory Function of MEK Inhibitors Mediates Therapeutic Efficacy , Mengyu Xie

Novel Strategies on Characterizing Biologically Specific Protein-protein Interaction Networks , Bi Zhao

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Characterization of the Transcriptional Elongation Factor ELL3 in B cells and Its Role in B-cell Lymphoma Proliferation and Survival , Lou-Ella M.m. Alexander

Identification of Regulatory miRNAs Associated with Ethanol-Induced Microglial Activation Using Integrated Proteomic and Transcriptomic Approaches , Brandi Jo Cook

Molecular Phylogenetics of Floridian Boletes , Arian Farid

MYC Distant Enhancers Underlie Ovarian Cancer Susceptibility at the 8q24.21 Locus , Anxhela Gjyshi Gustafson

Quantitative Proteomics to Support Translational Cancer Research , Melissa Hoffman

A Systems Chemical Biology Approach for Dissecting Differential Molecular Mechanisms of Action of Clinical Kinase Inhibitors in Lung Cancer , Natalia Junqueira Sumi

Investigating the Roles of Fucosylation and Calcium Signaling in Melanoma Invasion , Tyler S. Keeley

Synthesis, Oxidation, and Distribution of Polyphenols in Strawberry Fruit During Cold Storage , Katrina E. Kelly

Investigation of Alcohol-Induced Changes in Hepatic Histone Modifications Using Mass Spectrometry Based Proteomics , Crystina Leah Kriss

Off-Target Based Drug Repurposing Using Systems Pharmacology , Brent M. Kuenzi

Investigation of Anemarrhena asphodeloides and its Constituent Timosaponin-AIII as Novel, Naturally Derived Adjunctive Therapeutics for the Treatment of Advanced Pancreatic Cancer , Catherine B. MarElia

The Role of Phosphohistidine Phosphatase 1 in Ethanol-induced Liver Injury , Daniel Richard Martin

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Changing the Pathobiological Paradigm in Myelodysplastic Syndromes: The NLRP3 Inflammasome Drives the MDS Phenotype , Ashley Basiorka

Modeling of Dynamic Allostery in Proteins Enabled by Machine Learning , Mohsen Botlani-Esfahani

Uncovering Transcriptional Activators and Targets of HSF-1 in Caenorhabditis elegans , Jessica Brunquell

The Role of Sgs1 and Exo1 in the Maintenance of Genome Stability. , Lillian Campos-Doerfler

Mechanisms of IKBKE Activation in Cancer , Sridevi Challa

Discovering Antibacterial and Anti-Resistance Agents Targeting Multi-Drug Resistant ESKAPE Pathogens , Renee Fleeman

Functional Roles of Matrix Metalloproteinases in Bone Metastatic Prostate Cancer , Jeremy S. Frieling

Disorder Levels of c-Myb Transactivation Domain Regulate its Binding Affinity to the KIX Domain of CREB Binding Protein , Anusha Poosapati

Role of Heat Shock Transcription Factor 1 in Ovarian Cancer Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition and Drug Sensitivity , Chase David Powell

Cell Division Regulation in Staphylococcus aureus , Catherine M. Spanoudis

A Novel Approach to the Discovery of Natural Products From Actinobacteria , Rahmy Tawfik

Non-classical regulators in Staphylococcus aureus , Andy Weiss

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

In Vitro and In Vivo Antioxidant Capacity of Synthetic and Natural Polyphenolic Compounds Identified from Strawberry and Fruit Juices , Marvin Abountiolas

Quantitative Proteomic Investigation of Disease Models of Type 2 Diabetes , Mark Gabriel Athanason

CMG Helicase Assembly and Activation: Regulation by c-Myc through Chromatin Decondensation and Novel Therapeutic Avenues for Cancer Treatment , Victoria Bryant

Computational Modeling of Allosteric Stimulation of Nipah Virus Host Binding Protein , Priyanka Dutta

Cell Cycle Arrest by TGFß1 is Dependent on the Inhibition of CMG Helicase Assembly and Activation , Brook Samuel Nepon-Sixt

Gene Expression Profiling and the Role of HSF1 in Ovarian Cancer in 3D Spheroid Models , Trillitye Paullin

VDR-RIPK1 Interaction and its Implications in Cell Death and Cancer Intervention , Waise Quarni

Regulation of nAChRs and Stemness by Nicotine and E-cigarettes in NSCLC , Courtney Schaal

Targeting Histone Deacetylases in Melanoma and T-cells to Improve Cancer Immunotherapy , Andressa Sodre De Castro Laino

Nonreplicative DNA Helicases Involved in Maintaining Genome Stability , Salahuddin Syed

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Functional Analysis of the Ovarian Cancer Susceptibility Locus at 9p22.2 Reveals a Transcription Regulatory Network Mediated by BNC2 in Ovarian Cells , Melissa Buckley

Exploring the Pathogenic and Drug Resistance Mechanisms of Staphylococcus aureus , Whittney Burda

Regulation and Targeting of the FANCD2 Activation in DNA Repair , Valentina Celeste Caceres

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Cochrane Breast Cancer

Top 10 breast cancer topics needing a cochrane systematic review.

Deciding which research topics to focus on in medicine and health depends on many factors. These factors can include the currency of a topic, feedback from people providing or receiving care, and the priorities of funders.

In late 2019, the Cochrane Breast Cancer Group (part of Cochrane’s Cancer Network) conducted a formal priority-setting exercise to help decide which review topics were most needed in the Cochrane Library. The Group did this by circulating a survey listing 25 new or existing review topics to a diverse group of individuals who are part of the international breast cancer community. The survey asked individuals to rank their top 10 topics from the list. Read details about the aims and methods used for this priority-setting exercise, which adhered to the standards outlined in Cochrane’s priority setting guidance note .

What were the top 10 review topics?

Read about the ranking of the 25 new or existing review topics .

What is next?

Support to author teams For the top 10 topics, the Cochrane Breast Cancer Group will prioritise these topics during the editorial and peer-review process.

For all breast cancer review topics registered with Cochrane, the Cochrane Breast Cancer Group continues to work on these topics with author teams as these remain important topics. There will be no noticeable change in the support provided to author teams.

Future topics The Cochrane Breast Cancer Group is open to receiving new topic ideas. If you have suggestions for new topics that are not currently covered in the Cochrane Library, please send your idea to [email protected] .

Repeating this priority-setting exercise The priority-setting exercise may be repeated every 3 years, depending on resources.

Who responded to the survey?

The survey was circulated to over 800 individuals. Of the 199 people who responded, 90 people (45%) provided complete responses. The respondents were doctors (59%), researchers (18%) and people who had received treatment or currently receiving treatment for breast cancer (14%). Most respondents were from the UK, followed by the USA, Argentina, and India.

How did we calculate the ranking for each review topic?

The average ranking was calculated for each topic. This method is commonly used to determine ranking scores from surveys. This approach considers the number of counts for each ranking on a topic, the weighting of each rank (where a ranking of 1 gets the most weight) and the total number of counts. 

[Cover image: foliage of the Yew tree. Taxanes, a class of chemotherapy drugs, were originally derived from the Yew tree]

• Open access
• Published: 26 November 2018

The 150 most important questions in cancer research and clinical oncology series: questions 94–101

Edited by Cancer Communications

Cancer Communications

Cancer Communications volume  38 , Article number:  69 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Since the beginning of 2017, Cancer Communications (former title: Chinese Journal of Cancer ) has published a series of important questions regarding cancer research and clinical oncology, to provide an enhanced stimulus for cancer research, and to accelerate collaborations between institutions and investigators. In this edition, the following 8 valuable questions are presented. Question 94. The origin of tumors: time for a new paradigm? Question 95. How can we accelerate the identification of biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma? Question 96. Can we improve the treatment outcomes of metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma through precision medicine guided by a combination of the genetic and proteomic information of the tumor? Question 97. What are the parameters that determine a competent immune system that gives a complete response to cancers after immune induction? Question 98. Is high local concentration of metformin essential for its anti-cancer activity? Question 99. How can we monitor the emergence of cancer cells anywhere in the body through plasma testing? Question 100. Can phytochemicals be more specific and efficient at targeting P-glycoproteins to overcome multi-drug resistance in cancer cells? Question 101. Is cell migration a selectable trait in the natural evolution of carcinoma?

Until now, the battle against cancer is still ongoing, but there are also ongoing discoveries being made. Milestones in cancer research and treatments are being achieved every year; at a quicker pace, as compared to decades ago. Likewise, some cancers that were considered incurable are now partly curable, lives that could not be saved are now being saved, and for those with yet little options, they are now having best-supporting care. With an objective to promote worldwide cancer research and even accelerate inter-countries collaborations, since the beginning of 2017, Cancer Communications (former title: Chinese Journal of Cancer ) has launched a program of publishing 150 most important questions in cancer research and clinical oncology [ 1 ]. We are providing a platform for researchers to freely voice-out their novel ideas, and propositions to enhance the communications on how and where our focus should be placed [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ]. In this edition, 8 valuable and inspiring questions, Question 94–101, from highly distinguished professionals from different parts of the world are presented. If you have any novel proposition(s) and Question(s), please feel free to contact Ms. Ji Ruan via email: [email protected].

Question 94: The origin of tumors: time for a new paradigm?

Background and implications.

“There is no worse blind man than the one who doesn’t want to see. There is no worse deaf man than the one who doesn’t want to hear. And there is no worse madman than the one who doesn’t want to understand.” —Ancient Proverb

In the past half-century, cancer biologists have focused on a dogma in which cancer was viewed as a proliferative disease due to mechanisms that activate genes (oncogenes) to promote cell proliferation or inactivate genes (tumor suppressor genes) to suppress tumor growth. In retrospect, these concepts were established based on functional selections, by using tissue culture (largely mouse NIH 3T3 cells) for the selection of transformed foci at the time when we knew virtually nothing about the human genome [ 14 ]. However, it is very difficult to use these genes individually or in combinations to transform primary human cells. Further, the simplified view of uncontrolled proliferation cannot explain the tumor as being a malignant organ or a teratoma, as observed by pathologists over centuries. Recently, the cancer genomic atlas project has revealed a wide variety of genetic alterations ranging from no mutation to multiple chromosomal deletions or fragmentations, which make the identification of cancer driver mutations very challenging in a background of such a massive genomic rearrangement. Paradoxically, this increase the evidences demonstrating that the oncogenic mutations are commonly found in many normal tissues, further challenging the dogma that genetic alteration is the primary driver of this disease.

Logically, the birth of a tumor should undergo an embryonic-like development at the beginning, similar to that of a human. However, the nature of such somatic-derived early embryo has been elusive. Recently, we provided evidence to show that polyploid giant cancer cells (PGCCs), which have been previously considered non-dividing, are actually capable of self-renewal, generating viable daughter cells via amitotic budding, splitting and burst, and capable of acquisition of embryonic-like stemness [ 15 , 16 , 17 ]. The mode of PGCC division is remarkably similar to that of blastomere, a first step in human embryogenesis following fertilization. The blastomere nucleus continuously divides 4–5 times without cytoplasmic division to generate 16–32 cells and then to form compaction/morulae before developing into a blastocyst [ 18 ]. Based on these data and similarity to the earliest stage of human embryogenesis, I propose a new theory that tumor initiation can be achieved via a dualistic origin, similar to the first step of human embryogenesis via the formation of blastomere-like cells, i.e. the activation of blastomere or blastomere-like cells which leads to the dedifferentiation of germ cells or somatic cells, respectively, which is then followed by the differentiation to generate their respective stem cells, and the differentiation arrest at a specific developmental hierarchy leading to tumor initiation [ 19 ]. The somatic-derived blastomere-like cancer stem cell follows its own mode of cell growth and division and is named as the giant cell cycle. This cycle includes four distinct but overlapping phases: the initiation, self-renewal, termination, and stability phases. The giant cell cycle can be tracked in vitro and in vivo due to their salient giant cell morphology (Fig.  1 ).

One mononucleated polyploid giant cancer cell (PGCC) in the background of regular size diploid cancer cells. The PGCC can be seen to be at least 100 times larger than that of regular cancer cells

This new theory challenges the traditional paradigm that cancer is a proliferative disease, and proposes that the initiation of cancer requires blastomere-like division that is similar to that of humans before achieving stable proliferation at specific developmental hierarchy in at least half of all human cancers. This question calls for all investigators in the cancer research community to investigate the role of PGCCs in the initiation, progression, resistance, and metastasis of cancer and to look for novel agents to block the different stages of the giant cell cycle.

The histopathology (phenotype) of cancers has been there all the time. It is just the theory of cancer origin proposed by scientists that changes from time to time. After all, trillions of dollars have been invested in fighting this disease by basing on its genetic origin in the past half-century, yet, little insight has been gained [ 14 ]. Here are two quotes from Einstein: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results”, and “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when created them”.

In short, it is time to change our mindset and to start pursuing PGCCs, which we can observe under the microscope. But with very little understanding about these cells, it is time for a shift in paradigm.

Jinsong Liu.

Affiliation

Department of Pathology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030-4095, USA.

Email address

[email protected]

Question 95: How can we accelerate the identification of biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma?

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal cancers in the world with a dismal 5-year overall survival rate of less than 5%; which has not been significantly improved since the past decades. Although surgical resection is the only option for curative treatment of PDAC, only 15%–20% of patients with PDAC have the chance to undergo curative resection, leaving the rest with only palliative options in hope for increasing their quality of life; since they were already at unresectable and non-curative stages at their first diagnosis.

The lack of specific symptoms in the early-stage of PDAC is responsible for rendering an early diagnosis difficult. Therefore, more sensitive and specific screening methodologies for its early detection is urgently needed to improve its diagnosis, starting early treatments, and ameliorating prognoses. The diagnosis so far relies on imaging modalities such as abdominal ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), endoscopic ultrasound (EUS), endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), and positron emission tomography (PET). One may propose to screen for pancreatic cancer in high-risk populations, which is highly recommended, however screening intervention for all the people is not a wise choice; when considering the relatively low prevalence of PDAC, and the difficulty for diagnosing it in its early stage [ 20 ].

Therefore, alternative diagnostic tools for early detection of PDAC are highly expected. Among the biomarkers currently used in clinical practice, carbohydrate antigen 19–9 (CA19–9) is among the most useful one for supporting the diagnosis of PDAC, but it is neither sufficiently sensitive nor specific for its early detection. Yachida et al. reported in 2010 that the initiating mutation in the pancreas occurs approximately two decades before the PDAC to start growing in distant organs [ 21 ], which indicates a broad time of the window of opportunity for the early detection of PDAC. With the advancement in next-generation sequencing technology, the number of reported studies regarding novel potential molecular biomarkers in bodily fluids including the blood, feces, urine, saliva, and pancreatic juice for early detection of PDAC has been increasing. Such biomarkers may be susceptible to detect mutations at the genetic or epigenetic level, identifying important non-coding RNA (especially microRNA and long non-coding RNA), providing insights regarding the metabolic profiles, estimating the tumor level in liquid biopsies (circulating free DNA, circulating tumor cells and exosomes), and so on.

Another approach to identifying biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic cancer is using animal models. In spontaneous animal models of pancreatic cancer, such as Kras-mutated mouse models, it is expected that by high throughput analyses of the genetic/epigenetic/proteomic alterations, some novel biomarkers might be able to be identified. For instance, Sharma et al. reported in 2017 that the detection of phosphatidylserine-positive exosomes enabled the diagnosis of early-stage malignancies in LSL-Kras G12D , Cdkn2a lox/lox : p48 Cre and LSL-Kras G12d/+ , LSL-Trp R172H/+ , and P48 Cre mice [ 22 ].

These analyses in clinical samples or animal models hold the clues for the early detection of PDAC, however, further studies are required to validate their diagnostic performance. What’s most important, will be the lining-up of these identified prospective biomarkers, to validate their sensitivities and specificities. This will determine their potential for widespread clinical applicability, and hopefully, accelerate the early diagnosis of PDAC.

Mikiya Takao 1,2 , Hirotaka Matsuo 2 , Junji Yamamoto 1 , and Nariyoshi Shinomiya 2 .

1 Department of Surgery, National Defense Medical College, 3-2 Namiki, Tokorozawa, Saitama 359-8513, Japan; 2 Department of Integrative Physiology and Bio-Nano Medicine, National Defense Medical College, 3-2 Namiki, Tokorozawa, Saitama 359-8513, Japan.

E-mail address

[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Question 96: Can we improve the treatment outcomes of metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma through precision medicine guided by a combination of the genetic and proteomic information of the tumor?

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most malignant cancers, and nearly half of the patients had metastatic PDAC when they are initially diagnosed. When they are accompanied by metastatic tumors, unlike most solid cancer, PDAC cannot be cured with primary surgical resection alone [ 23 , 24 ]. Also, since PDAC has poor responses to conventional therapies, improvements in adjunctive treatment approach including chemo- and immuno-therapy are earnestly required. From this standpoint, recent results regarding the differences in the molecular evolution of pancreatic cancer subtypes provide a new insight into its therapeutic development [ 25 ], which may lead to the improvement of the prognosis of not only metastatic PDAC but also of locally advanced or recurrent PDAC.

In fact, new chemotherapeutic regimens such as the combination of gemcitabine with nab-paclitaxel and FOLFIRINOX have been reported to show improved prognosis despite a lack of examples of past successes in the treatment of patients with metastatic PDAC who had undergone R0 resection [ 26 ]. While many mutations including KRAS , CDKN2A , TP53, and SMAD4 are associated with pancreatic carcinogenesis, no effective molecular targeted drug has been introduced in the clinical setting so far. A recent report of a phase I/II study on refametinib, a MEK inhibitor, indicated that KRAS mutation status might affect the overall response rate, disease control rate, progression-free survival, and overall survival of PDAC in combination with gemcitabine [ 27 ].

While immunotherapy is expected to bring a great improvement in cancer treatment, until now, immune checkpoint inhibitors have achieved limited clinical benefit for patients with PDAC. This might be because PDAC creates a uniquely immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, where tumor-associated immunosuppressive cells and accompanying desmoplastic stroma prevent the tumor cells from T cell infiltration. Recently reported studies have indicated that immunotherapy might be effective when combined with focal adhesion kinase (FAK) inhibitor [ 28 ] or IL-6 inhibitor [ 29 ], but more studies are required to validate their use in clinical practice.

As such, we believe that if the dynamic monitoring of drug sensitivity/resistance in the individual patients is coupled with precision treatment based on individualized genetics/epigenetics/proteomics alterations in the patients’ tumor, this could improve the treatment outcomes of PDAC.

Mikiya Takao 1,2 , Hirotaka Matsuo 2 , Junji Yamamoto 1 , and Nariyoshi Shinomiya 2.

Question 97: What are the parameters that determine a competent immune system that gives a complete response to cancers after immune induction?

Recently, cancer immunotherapy has shown great clinical benefit in multiple types of cancers [ 30 , 31 , 32 ]. It has provided new approaches for cancer treatment. However, it has been observed that only a fraction of patients respond to immunotherapy.

Much effort has been made to identify markers for immunotherapeutic response. Tumor mutation burden (TMB), mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency, PD-L1 expression, and tumor infiltration lymphocyte (TIL) have been found to be associated with an increased response rate in checkpoint blockade therapies. Unfortunately, a precise prediction is still challenging in this field. Moreover, when to stop the treatment of immunotherapy is an urgent question that remains to be elucidated.

In other words, there is no available approach to determine if a patient has generated a good immune response against the cancer after immunotherapy treatments. All of these indicate the complexity and challenges that reside for implementing novel man-induced cancer-effective immune response therapeutics. A variety of immune cells play collaborative roles at different stages to recognize antigens and eventually to generate an effective anti-cancer immune response. Given the high complexity of the immune system, a rational evaluation approach is needed to cover the whole process. Moreover, we need to perfect vaccine immunization and/or in vitro activation of T cells to augment the function of the immune system; particularly the formation of immune memory.

Edison Liu 1 , Penghui Zhou 2 , Jiang Li 2 .

1 The Jackson Laboratory, Bar Harbor, ME 04609, USA; 2 Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510060, P. R. China.

[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Question 98: Is high local concentration of metformin essential for its anti-cancer activity?

Metformin was approved as a first line of anti-diabetic drug since decades. Interestingly, the fact that clinical epidemiological studies have shown that metformin can reduce the risk of a variety of cancers stimulates considerable recognition to explore its anticancer activity.

Although the in vitro and in vivo experimental results have demonstrated that metformin can have some potential anti-tumor effects, more than 100 clinical trials did not achieve such desirable results [ 33 ]. We and others believe that the main problem resides in the prescribing doses used. For cancer treatment, a much higher dose may be needed for observing any anti-tumor activities, as compared to the doses prescribed for diabetics [ 34 , 35 , 36 ].

Further, if the traditional local/oral administration approach is favored, the prescribed metformin may not be at the required dose-concentration once it reaches the blood to have the effective anti-cancer activities. We, therefore, propose that intravesical instillation of metformin into the bladder lumen could be a promising way to treat for bladder cancer, at least. We have already obtained encouraging results both in vitro and in vivo experiments, including in an orthotopical bladder cancer model [ 36 , 37 ]. Now, we are waiting to observe its prospective clinical outcome.

Mei Peng 1 , Xiaoping Yang 2 .

1 Department of Pharmacy, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University. Changsha, Hunan 410083, P. R. China; 2 Key Laboratory of Study and Discovery of Small Targeted Molecules of Hunan Province, Department of Pharmacy, School of Medicine, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan 410013, P. R. China.

[email protected]; [email protected]

Question 99: How can we monitor the emergence of cancer cells anywhere in the body through plasma testing?

The early detection of cancer is still a relentless worldwide challenge. The sensitivity and specificity of traditional blood tumor markers and imaging technologies are still to be greatly improved. Hence, novel approaches for the early detection of cancer are urgently needed.

The emergence of liquid biopsy technologies opens a new driveway for solving such issues. According to the definition of the National Cancer Institute of the United States, a liquid biopsy is a test done on a sample of blood to look for tumorigenic cancer cells or pieces of tumor cells’ DNA that are circulating in the blood [ 38 ]. This definition implies two main types of the current liquid biopsy: one that detects circulating tumor cells and the other that detects non-cellular material in the blood, including tumor DNA, RNA, and exosomes.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are referred to as tumor cells that have been shed from the primary tumor location and have found their way to the peripheral blood. CTCs were first described in 1869 by an Australian pathologist, Thomas Ashworth, in a patient with metastatic cancer [ 39 ]. The importance of CTCs in modern cancer research began in the mid-1990s with the demonstration that CTCs exist early in the course of the disease.

It is estimated that there are about 1–10 CTCs per mL in whole blood of patients with metastatic cancer, even fewer in patients with early-stage cancer [ 40 ]. For comparison, 1 mL of blood contains a few million white blood cells and a billion erythrocytes. The identification of CTCs, being in such low frequency, requires some special tumoral markers (e.g., EpCAM and cytokeratins) to capture and isolate them. Unfortunately, the common markers for recognizing the majority of CTCs are not effective enough for clinical application [ 41 ]. Although accumulated evidences have shown that the presence of CTCs is a strong negative prognostic factor in the patients with metastatic breast, lung and colorectal cancers, detecting CTCs might not be an ideal branch to hold on for the hope of early cancer detection [ 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 ].

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is tumor-derived fragmented DNA in the circulatory system, which is mainly derived from the tumor cell death through necrosis and/or apoptosis [ 46 ]. Given its origin, ctDNA inherently carries cancer-specific genetic and epigenetic aberrations, which can be used as a surrogate source of tumor DNA for cancer diagnosis and prognostic prediction. Ideally, as a noninvasive tumor early screening tool, a liquid biopsy test should be able to detect many types of cancers and provide the information of tumor origin for further specific clinical management. In fact, the somatic mutations of ctDNA in different types of tumor are highly variable, even in the different individuals with the same type of tumor [ 47 ]. Additionally, most tumors do not possess driver mutations, with some notable exceptions, which make the somatic mutations of ctDNA not suitable for early detection of the tumor.

Increased methylation of the promoter regions of tumor suppressor genes is an early event in many types of tumor, suggesting that altered ctDNA methylation patterns could be one of the first detectable neoplastic changes associated with tumorigenesis [ 48 ]. ctDNA methylation profiling provides several advantages over somatic mutation analysis for cancer detection including higher clinical sensitivity and dynamic range, multiple detectable methylation target regions, and multiple altered CpG sites within each targeted genomic region. Further, each methylation marker is present in both cancer tissue and ctDNA, whereas only a fraction of mutations present in cancer tissue could be detected in ctDNA.

In 2017, there were two inspiring studies that revealed the values of using ctDNA methylation analysis for cancer early diagnosis [ 49 , 50 ]. After partitioning the human genome into blocks of tightly coupled CpG methylation sites, namely methylation haplotype blocks (MHBs), Guo and colleagues performed tissue-specific methylation analyses at the MHBs level to accurately determine the tissue origin of the cancer using ctDNA from their enrolled patients [ 49 ]. In another study, Xu and colleagues identified a hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) enriched methylation marker panel by comparing the HCC tissue and blood leukocytes from normal individuals and showed that methylation profiles of HCC tumor DNA and matched plasma ctDNA were highly correlated. In this study, after quantitative measurement of the methylation level of candidate markers in ctDNA from a large cohort of 1098 HCC patients and 835 normal controls, ten methylation markers were selected to construct a diagnostic prediction model. The proposed model demonstrated a high diagnostic specificity and sensitivity, and was highly correlated with tumor burden, treatment response, and tumor stage [ 50 ].

With the rapid development of highly sensitive detection methods, especially the technologies of massively parallel sequencing or next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based assays and digital PCR (dPCR), we strongly believe that the identification of a broader “pan-cancer” methylation panel applied for ctDNA analyses, probably in combination with detections of somatic mutation and tumor-derived exosomes, would allow more effective screening for common cancers in the near future.

Edison Liu 1 , Hui-Yan Luo 2 .

[email protected]; [email protected]

Question 100: Can phytochemicals be more specific and efficient at targeting P-glycoproteins to overcome multi-drug resistance in cancer cells?

Though several anticancer agents are approved to treat different types of cancers, their full potentials have been limited due to the occurrence of drug resistance. Resistance to anticancer drugs develops by a variety of mechanisms, one of which is increased drug efflux by transporters. The ATP-binding cassette (ABC) family drug efflux transporter P-glycoprotein (P-gp or multi-drug resistance protein 1 [MDRP1]) has been extensively studied and is known to play a major role in the development of multi-drug resistance (MDR) to chemotherapy [ 51 ]. In brief, overexpressed P-gp efflux out a wide variety of anticancer agents (e.g.: vinca alkaloids, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, etc.), leading to a lower concentration of these drugs inside cancer cells, thereby resulting in MDR. Over the past three decades, researchers have developed several synthetic P-gp inhibitors to block the efflux of anticancer drugs and have tested them in clinical trials, in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs. But none were found to be suitable enough in overcoming MDR and to be released for marketing, mainly due to the side effects associated with cross-reactivity towards other ABC transporters (BCRP and MRP-1) and the inhibition of CYP450 drug metabolizing enzymes [ 52 , 53 ].

On the other hand, a number of phytochemicals have been reported to have P-gp inhibitory activity. Moreover, detailed structure–activity studies on these phytochemicals have delineated the functional groups essential for P-gp inhibition [ 53 , 54 ]. Currently, one of the phytochemicals, tetrandrine (CBT-1 ® ; NSC-77037), is being used in a Phase I clinical trial ( http://www.ClinicalTrials.gov ; NCT03002805) in combination with doxorubicin for the treatment of metastatic sarcoma. Before developing phytochemicals or their derivatives as P-gp inhibitors, they need to be investigated thoroughly for their cross-reactivity towards other ABC transporters and CYP450 inhibition, in order to avoid toxicities similar to the older generation P-gp inhibitors that have failed in clinical trials.

Therefore, the selectivity for P-gp over other drug transporters and drug metabolizing enzymes should be considered as important criterias for the development of phytochemicals and their derivatives for overcoming MDR.

Mohane Selvaraj Coumar and Safiulla Basha Syed.

Centre for Bioinformatics, School of Life Sciences, Pondicherry University, Kalapet, Puducherry 605014, India.

[email protected]; [email protected]

Question 101: Is cell migration a selectable trait in the natural evolution of carcinoma?

The propensity of solid tumor malignancy to metastasize remains the main cause of cancer-related death, an extraordinary unmet clinical need, and an unanswered question in basic cancer research. While dissemination has been traditionally viewed as a late process in the progression of malignant tumors, amount of evidence indicates that it can occur early in the natural history of cancer, frequently when the primary lesion is still barely detectable.

A prerequisite for cancer dissemination is the acquisition of migratory/invasive properties. However, whether, and if so, how the migratory phenotype is selected for during the natural evolution of cancer and what advantage, if any, it may provide to the growing malignant cells remains an open issue. The answers to these questions are relevant not only for our understating of cancer biology but also for the strategies we adopt in an attempt of curbing this disease. Frequently, indeed, particularly in pharmaceutical settings, targeting migration has been considered much like trying “to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted” and no serious efforts in pursuing this aim has been done.

We argue, instead, that migration might be an intrinsic cancer trait that much like proliferation or increased survival confers to the growing tumor masses with striking selective advantages. The most compelling evidence in support for this contention stems from studies using mathematical modeling of cancer evolution. Surprisingly, these works highlighted the notion that cell migration is an intrinsic, selectable property of malignant cells, so intimately intertwined with more obvious evolutionarily-driven cancer traits to directly impact not only on the potential of malignant cells to disseminate but also on their growth dynamics, and ultimately provide a selective evolutionary advantage. Whether in real life this holds true remains to be assessed, nevertheless, work of this kind defines a framework where the acquisition of migration can be understood in a term of not just as a way to spread, but also to trigger the emergence of malignant clones with favorable genetic or epigenetic traits.

Alternatively, migratory phenotypes might emerge as a response to unfavorable conditions, including the mechanically challenging environment which tumors, and particularly epithelial-derived carcinoma, invariably experience. Becoming motile, however, may not per se being fixed as phenotypic advantageous traits unless it is accompanied or is causing the emergence of specific traits, including drug resistance, self-renewal, and survival. This might be the case, for example, during the process of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which is emerging as an overarching mechanism for dissemination. EMT, indeed, may transiently equip individual cancer cells not only with migratory/invasive capacity but also with increased resistance to drug treatment, stemness potential at the expanse of fast proliferation.

Thus, within this framework targeting pro-migratory genes, proteins and processes may become a therapeutically valid alternative or a complementary strategy not only to control carcinoma dissemination but also its progression and development.

Giorgio Scita.

IFOM, The FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology, Via Adamello 16, 20139 Milan, Italy; Department of Oncology and Hemato-Oncology (DIPO), School of Medicine, University of Milan, Via Festa del Perdono 7, 20122, Italy.

[email protected]

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Cancer Communications. The 150 most important questions in cancer research and clinical oncology series: questions 94–101. Cancer Commun 38 , 69 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40880-018-0341-9

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• Tumor origin
• Polyploid giant cancer cell
• Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma
• Liquid biopsy
• Spontaneous animal model
• Chemotherapy
• Immunotherapy
• Precision treatment
• Vaccine immunization
• Circulating tumor cell
• Circulating tumor DNA
• CpG methylation
• Methylation haplotype block
• Phytochemicals
• P-Glycoprotein
• Multi-drug resistance
• P-Glycoprotein inhibitor
• Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition
• Pro-migratory gene

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Top 100 Cited Classic Articles in Breast Cancer Research

This study aimed to analyze 100 most cited articles in breast cancer research.

Materials and Methods

The data in this study were obtained by a search conducted on the Web of Science (WOS). In brief, the term “breast cancer” was typed in the search box of WOS basic research including all the years and the data. The analysis was carried out by compiling the top 100 cited articles in the shortlist as sorted by the journals, categories of the studies, the countries, the centers, the authors and the publication date. No statistical methods were used in the study. All data were reported as percentages, numbers and bar charts on tables.

Our findings showed that the most frequently cited article received 7609 citations to date. Most articles were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 81% of the studies originated from the USA. The National Institutes of Health (NIH USA) was ranked the first with 21% and it was followed by Harvard University in terms of number of published articles. 42% of the articles were published under the category of medicine and general internal medicine.

Top 100 most cited articles originated from the United States. The highest number of articles among the top 100 articles were published in New England Journal of Medicine and National Institutes of Health NIH USA was the leading institutes published the most articles.

Introduction

There has been a growing increase in the incidence of breast cancer ( 1 ), which is still the most significant cancer-related cause of female mortality ( 2 ). In spite of significant progress in the management of breast cancer, the search for a curative treatment is still ongoing. Although a number of crucial studies and clinical trials have significantly contributed to the improvement of breast cancer care, many often remain unknown to the majority of clinicians, suggesting a need to identify at least the top 100 most cited studies in the field. Actually, in the past, there were a couple of studies which identified the most cited articles in several fields such as digestive disease and psychology ( 3 , 4 ), which helped the researchers in this field to easily access them. This identification is important because the decisions made by the clinicians are generally based on the evidence and the studies with a high impact ( 5 ). The most significant component of the methodological qualities of studies is associated with an increase of citation and a high impact factor of the journal where it is published ( 6 ). The object of this study was to identify and analyze the qualities of the top 100 cited papers in breast cancer-related studies.

The data in this study were obtained by a search conducted on the Web of Science (WOS) (Clarivate Analytics, United States). The journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded were included. There were no restrictions on the journals. The Science Citation Index Expanded in WOS covers more than 8,500 notable and major journals encompassing 150 disciplines. The coverage time extends from 1900 to the present ( 7 ). The term “Breast cancer” was typed into the search box of WOS basic research with the selection of all the years and the data were searched in Title setting. Our search produced 189.235 published articles between 1978–2017. Thereafter, they were listed based on the citation frequency-from the highest to the lowest. The analysis was carried out by compiling the Top 100 cited classical articles in a shortlist as sorted by the journals, categories of the studies, countries, centers where the studies were published, authors and publication date. Since this was not invasive study, an approval from the ethical committee was not requested. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Statistical analysis

No statistical methods were used in the study. All the data were given in percentages, numbers and bar charts.

The articles included in the study were ranked according to the frequency of citation ( Table 1 ). Our search demonstrated that among the top 100 articles, the most frequently cited article received 7609 citations while the least cited article received 960 citations. We found that 93 of the articles received more than 1000 citations and determined that the top 100 articles were published between 1985 and 2011 ( Table 2 ). The number of most cited articles peaked in 2005 with 12 publications, while the number of least cited in articles peaked in 1990 and 1993 with only two publications.

The top 100 cited articles in breast cancer research

Distribution of articles by publication date

These top 100 articles were published in 14 high-impact journals where 25 out of 100 articles were published in the New England Journal of Medicine ( Table 3 ).

Journals in which the top 100 cited articles were published

81% of the studies originated from the USA while the rest originated from the UK, Canada and Italy ( Table 4 ). These top 100 articles that originated from 50 different centers and National Institutes of Health (NIH USA) ranked as the first with 21% of total articles followed by Harvard University and NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI). The University of Washington ranked the last with 4% ( Table 5 ).

Countries of origin of the top 100 cited article

Institutions of origin

Among top 100 authors in these articles, Wolmark N. was determined to be the mostly cited common author with 12% followed by Fisher B. and Bryant J., respectively ( Table 6 ). Furthermore, 42% of these articles were categorized under the title of medicine and general internal medicine followed by studies under the category of multidisciplinary sciences, oncology and genetic hereditary diseases, respectively. The rate of studies under the surgery category was found to be the lowest with 2% ( Table 7 ).

Most common the first 20 authors

Discussion and Conclusion

Bibliometric analysis can be conducted in many areas for different purposes ( 8 , 9 ) and can be used to reveal the historical development in a field ( 9 ). In this study, we aimed to identify the top 100 most cited articles in breast cancer research to help researchers easily access and analyze them. In that respect, this study is one of the early studies under the title of breast cancer.

Although analyzing the top 100 most cited articles was relatively difficult, we identified that the top 100 articles were published between 1985 and 2011 thanks to systems such as WOS. The citations mostly peaked between 2005 and 2007. The number of citations to the studies conducted in the areas of orthopedics and neurosurgery peaked between 1965 and 1980 ( 10 , 11 ). However, the citation frequency of studies in the field of cardiology peaked between 2001 and 2010 ( 12 ). This result may suggest that the development and progression in the area of breast cancer may have occurred within a short period of time. In parallel with the technological advances that have occurred in the last two decades, a significant progress in breast cancer research has been also achieved.

The number of citations is closely associated with the publishing date, and has been increasing with time ( 9 ). For this reason, the vast majority of articles with a high number of citations consisted of early-published articles. No papers published after 2011 appeared in our list. However, the number of citations is not solely depended on publication date. For example, one article in our list published in 2005 received more citations than other articles published between 1985 and 1995.

Another interesting point of our analysis is that all the articles were published in journals with a high impact factor. The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet and Science were the journals which mostly published top 100 articles, indicating that the vast majority of the studies were published in the best-known general medical journals rather than specific journals in this field. It may be speculated that the audience of a general medical journal may be closely interested in the issue of breast cancer or it is possible to consider that the authors of studies on breast cancer preferentially choose the journals with a high impact.

Another point of our study is that the top 100 articles most often originated from the United States. The bibliometric analyses in other areas also showed that the United States ranked high on the list ( 13 , 14 ). These findings clearly show that the United States is at the forefront of studies on breast cancer. A wide range of patient population and a substantial amount of financial support to researchers can be the main reason behint this.

The authors who have received the highest number of citations are the people who are prominent in their field. For example, Wolmark N. authored 12 articles in the top 100 articles whereas Slamon Dennis J. was not in the list of the first 20 authors who have the highest number of articles although he was the first author in the first 3 articles that received the highest number of citations.

Breast cancer research has progressed historically and gone through milestones in various areas in this process. These areas include breast cancer gene associations, breast cancer treatment modalities, hormonal therapies, HER2 and breast cancer involvement, sentinel lymphadenectomy, breast conserving surgery, breast cancer metastasis, survival, neoadjuvant chemotherapy and breast screening.

Slamon Dennis J. was observed as the first author in first 3 articles with the highest number of citations. All three articles were about the oncogene HER2 / neu. It has been emphasized that HER2 / neu amplification gene has a high prognostic value and this gene may play a role in the pathogenesis of breast cancer. The first three articles with the highest number of citations are very important in terms of revealing the correlation between HER2 / neu and breast cancer. Prognosis is very low in patients with HER2 / neu positive breast cancer. For this reason, HER2-targeting therapies are thought to have positive effects on outcomes. Romond, Edward H., et al. showed an improvement in the outcomes of women with HER2-positive breast cancer treated with trastuzumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting the extracellular domain of HER2. Piccart-Gebhart, Martine J. et al also demonstrated the efficacy of trastuzumab in HER2-positive breast cancer patients after adjuvant chemotherapy. Vogel, Charles L., et al., showed that trastuzumab is safe and effective as a single agent in the first-line treatment of HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients. Seven of the top 100 articles are related to HER2 and trastuzumab and they are an important milestone in this field.

Today, hormonal treatments in breast cancer have an important place in therapy. Remmele, W., and H.E. Stegner identified estrogen receptors immunohistochemically from breast cancer tissues in 1987. Fisher, Bernard, et al. published a paper in 1989, showing a randomized clinical trial which demonstrated the efficacy of tamoxifen on breast cancer in patients that are estrogen- and progesterone-receptor-positive. This study provided significant progress in breast cancer treatment. The Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group investigated the efficacy of tamoxifen in early breast cancers in 1998. Fisher, Bernard et al. explained the protective effects of tamoxifen on breast cancer in 1998.

Gene-based studies have been conducted on breast cancer through the demonstration of the effects of genetic factors in many types of cancer. Miki Y, Swensen J, et al. reported the association of the BRCA-1 gene with breast cancer and ovarian cancer in 1994. Wooster, Richard, et al, showed a relationship between BRCA-2 gene and breast cancer in 1995. Easton, Douglas F. et al. investigated the incidence of breast and over-cancer in BRCA-1 gene mutation carriers. Ford, Deborah et al. showed that families with breast cancer have BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 identified in their gene analysis in relation to breast cancer in 1998. Antoniou, Anthony et al. published a study entitled ‘’ “Average risks of breast and ovarian cancer associated with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations detected in case series unselected for family history: a combined analysis of 22 studies” in 2003. Today, BRCA1 and 2 genes can be examined and prophylactic mastectomy can be decided upon ( Table 1 ).

Veronesi, Umberto et al. showed that using sentinel-node biopsy can help avoid axillary dissection in breast cancer patients with clinical negative lymph-nodes. Krag, David et al. emphasized the importance of sentinel node in breast cancer. In another study by Krag, D. N., et al., they showed that sentinel-node can be found by radiocalization with gamma probe. In 1994, Giuliano, Armando E. et al. described sentinel lymphadenectomy by lymphatic mapping. In 2003, Veronesi, Umberto et al. published a paper entitled “A randomized comparison of sentinel-node biopsy with routine axillary dissection in breast cancer”, and stated that sentinel-node biopsy was a safe and reliable method. All these papers constituted the milestones for avoiding unnecessary axillary dissection in breast cancer patients, and helped reduce morbidity associated with breast surgery ( Table 1 ).

While radical mastectomy surgery was commonly used as the conventional breast cancer treatment, modified radical mastectomy and especially preventive breast surgery are generally chosen as a curative treatment at the present time. The reason behind this change in treatment method actually is rooted in the findings of the following milestone papers: in 1981, the paper published by Veronesi, Umberto et al. compared radical mastectomy to quadrantectomy, and they found that there were no differences between these groups in terms of disease-free or overall survival rate. Fisher, Bernard et al. published a paper in 1985 entitled “Five-year results of a randomized clinical trial comparing total mastectomy and segmental mastectomy with or without radiation in the treatment of breast cancer.” and they determined that segmental mastectomy with breast irradiation and adjuvant chemotherapy was the appropriate treatment method in stage I and II breast cancer (less than 4 cm).

The rest of the top 100 cited articles were associated with adjuvant and neoadjuvant treatments, survival, breast cancer metastasis, and breast screening. These studies contribute to breast research by providing significant improvements.

In this bibliometric analysis, the vast majority of the top 100 articles were in the category of general internal medicine. It was followed by multi-disciplinary sciences, and the third in rank was oncology research. Surgery was at the bottom of the list. However, surgeons have significantly contributed to the area of breast cancer. The effects of significant studies which have been conducted in recent years will be seen during the upcoming years.

There are some limitations to our study. Only the studies having breast cancer in their title were included in the study. However, breast cancer as the topic of the studies was not taken into consideration. The studies on the topic of breast cancer with a high number of citations can also be separately analyzed. The results which have been found by typing ‘breast, breast neoplasm’ in the search box of WOS can be separately added to the analysis. In order to ensure homogenization in our study, analyses have been conducted under only one title and search.

As a result, it was found that top 100 most cited publications predominantly originated from the United States. The largest part of top 100 articles was published in New England Journal of Medicine. Most articles were published under the category of general internal medicine. The highest number of publications was in 2005. The articles about HER2 / neu were listed as the first three articles. It was determined that National Institutes of Health NIH USA and Harvard University were the institutes which published the highest number of articles.

Analysis of highly cited articles with ‘breast cancer’ in their title provided the opportunity to recognize the progress made in studies on breast cancer. It also provides a historical perspective on the development of breast cancer studies.

Ethics Committee Approval: Ethics committee approval was not requested for this study.

Informed Consent: Informed consent is not necessary as our work is a retrospective international data study.

Peer-review: Externally peer-reviewed.

Author Contributions: Concept - EU.; Design - EU.; Supervision - EU.; Resources - EU.; Materials - EU.; Data Collection and/or Processing - EU.; Analysis and/or Interpretation - EU.; Literature Search - EU.; Writing Manuscript - EU.; Critical Review - EU.; Other - EU.

Conflict of Interest: No conflict of interest was declared by the authors.

Financial Disclosure: The authors declared that this study has received no financial support.

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Dissertation topics covered in the molecular and cellular basics of cancer and development of target-specific therapeutics- Cancer/oncology

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• Researching cancer and its therapeutics is an important tool for cancer studies and medical writing services .
• The important topics to be covered while writing a thesis for cancer and its therapeutics are discussed in scientific medical writing .
• Pubrica is here to help with the easy scientific medical writing about cancer research and its therapeutics.

Introduction

Cancer is one of the life-threatening diseases, responsible for the mortality rate of 0.13% of the world’s population. It is essential to perform research in the field of cancer to overcome the emergency demand to control the death rate of cancer. The cancer research mainly has done to analyze the risk, to know the type of cancer, to study about the therapeutics etc with the help of medical writing solutions . The first and foremost essential knowledge to perform cancer research for a scientist is to know about the cellular basics of cancer development. Once after attaining knowledge, the researcher should submit a thesis about his work. Here are a few molecular and cellular basics about cancer/oncology.

Topics covered in molecular basics of cancer

Stability of a cell

Instable gene, oncogenesis.

• Suppressor genes for tumour

The growth phase of tumour

• Angiogenesis

Metastasis and model systems

Therapeutics.

The most common cause of cancer is an undefined mass of cell growth. It is essential to check the stability of a DNA  inside the cell during the replication, transcription and translation. Also, the DNA polymerase enzyme is the reason for the correct nucleotide activity. The above-mentioned are the basics of cell functioning. Whenever there is a problem in cell functioning, it may lead to cell damage.

The cell damage can lead to genetic instability. This process will change the structure of DNA and causes mutations and cancer. It will lead to the carcinogens to easily rupture the cellular metabolic process . This unstable gene leads to oncogenesis.

Oncogenesis is the process of transformation of normal cells to cancer cells. 

• Activation of oncogene
• Cell division takes place in an unmanageable manner

Tumour suppressor genes

The tumour suppressor genes stop functioning with inactivation of two alleles during oncogenesis. It will mislead the cell signalling pathways. For a non-cancerous cell, a TSG inhibit the growth of cancer. Hence it is called as the caretakers of the body.

The forementioned oncogene and TSG function will lead to decisive variations in cellular growth. This tumour cells will develop into cancer cells by shifting the equilibrium between apoptosis and proliferation of excessive cell growth. There will be a disturbance in the cell cycle pathways during this growth phase.

Angiogenesis 

The tumour cells need oxygen and nutrients supply from the blood. It will be obtained by passing the chemical signals to the blood vessels. However, there are several anti-angiogenesis drugs to inhibit this process.

Metastasis is the process, where cancer cells explore into foreign sites, leaving their prime site. In the next stage of metastasis, the cancer cells enter into the lymphatic organs and bloodstream, that leads to cancer death.

There are certain model systems to study the characterization of a phenotype and genotype. All the models should explain using medical writing help .

The need for cancer studies is mainly to access treatment. Scientists have developed many therapeutic agents for cancer studies but it is still in vain to cure a certain type of cancer especially blood cancer. The cancer treatment will have both the advantages and disadvantages depending upon the body condition of a patient. There is no particular treatment available for cancer. Out of all chemotherapy and drug treatment is the most common therapeutics for cancer treatment. Drug treatment is less toxic comparatively.

The above-mentioned passages are the topics to be discussed while doing a dissertation in cancer studies. It will ample information about the entry of cancer cells and the phases of cancer at a molecular level in our body. Medical writing solutions are there to complete the dissertation of topics of basic cellular level of cancer.

Conclusion 

Pubrica has given the details for the basic level cancer study research works. It will be helpful for the researchers to develop a vaccine or medicine that inhibits cancer. The cancer study dissertation can be done with the help of medical writing solutions and services.These basics will also help to do evaluations in future cancer studies. This article is fully checked with plagiarism correction and will be analysed by scientific writing companies.

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• Wang, L. H., Wu, C. F., Rajasekaran, N., & Shin, Y. K. (2018). Loss of tumour suppressor gene function in human cancer: An overview.  Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry ,  51 (6), 2647-2693.
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272 Cancer Research Topics for Undergraduates and High School Students

Are you looking for the best oncology research topics? You’re at the right place! StudyCorgi has prepared a list of cancer research topics for undergraduates and high school students! Read on to find a good title for your projects or term papers on prostate, breast, and other cancer types.

🏆 Best Research Topics on Cancer

✍️ cancer essay topics for college, 👍 good cancer research topics & essay examples, 📝 current cancer titles for essays, 🎓 interesting cancer topics to write about, 💡 simple cancer research paper topics, 📌 easy cancer essay topics, ❓ questions about cancer research, 🗣️ cancer topics for presentation, 🏥 cancer project ideas.

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• Skin Cancer Prevention in Australia Skin cancer, or melanoma, is the abnormal behavior of skin cells that is mainly caused by prolonged exposure of unprotected skin to ultraviolet rays.
• Behavioral Theory: Education Program for Oral Cancer This article uses the social learning theory and the theory of planned behavior to demonstrate the tenets of an effective health education program for the prevention of oral cancer.
• Disease Research: Breast Cancer Breast cancer is a multifactorial, complex illness that demands proper clinical understanding and a multidisciplinary way to determine diagnosis and treatment.
• Cervical Cancer: Case Study The paper reviews the cervical cancer key determinants, factors to ensure access to prevention technologies, and the trials that the Alliance for Cervical Cancer Prevention faces.
• Cancer: Symptoms and Consequences The research of the symptoms of cancer and its consequences to evaluate the seriousness of the problem in the USA but and the whole world.
• Recommendations for Breast Cancer Screening: USPSTF Guidelines This paper aims to give a proper recommendation for breast cancer screening under USPSTF guidelines while considering the differences in patients’ epidemiology.
• Breast Cancer and Effective Medical Treatment The aim of this paper is to characterize breast cancer and to describe the modern methods of its treatment and prevention.
• Approaches to Cancer Care Cancer is one of the most significant health problems of the modern society. Various types of cancer threaten or take the lives of thousands of people.
• Lung Cancer and Colorectal Cancer The rate of lung cancer is indeed lower in China when compared to Canada. Colorectal cancer is on the top list of cancerous diseases that kill people.
• Epigenetic Drugs for Cancer Treatment Cancer is a disease that requires special attention since it is not curable in all cases. However, scientists are developing new epigenetic drugs, which include HDAC inhibitors.
• A Critical Examination of WHO Screening and Treatment Guidelines for Cervical Cancer Cervical cancer is a devastating illness that affects women all over the world and continues to represent a serious threat to their health.
• Conference: Breast Cancer Survival In the medical sphere, cancer studies are one of the most essential and necessary specialties. For millions of cancer patients worldwide, life is a continued fight for survival.
• Colorectal Cancer and Other Cancer Signs and Diagnoses The reasons for increased colorectal cancer rates and decreased cervical cancer rates in Western society may be related to preferred lifestyles.
• Colorectal Cancer Screening and Its Importance Colorectal cancer screening is recommended by the United States Preventive Services Task Force as an effective way to reduce disease-related morbidity and mortality.
• Researching of Cervical Cancer In its initial stages, the cancer process is asymptomatic and is only detected during an extensive gynecological examination.
• Cancer Treatment Process Perceived by Women With Ovarian Cancer The current paper explores how the process of treating ovarian cancer affects the well-being and physical and emotional state of women.
• Smoking and Gender Factors of Lung Cancer The rising prevalence of lung cancer in young females compared to young males is widespread and not entirely explained by gender variations in smoking habits.
• The Importance of Nutrition in Cancer Prevention In the last few decades, the role that diet and nutrition play in the development, progress, and management of cancer has become an important area of study.
• Breast Cancer: Diagnosis and Treatment Recent efforts from medical professionals and interest groups like Breast Cancer Awareness Month facilitate open discussion around breast cancer.
• Bilateral Mastectomy for Breast Cancer Prevention One of the options for preventing the development of breast cancer is a bilateral mastectomy. But it may not be a good preventive choice for genetic markers of breast cancer.
• Drug Repurposing in Cancer Treatment This article examines the concept of drug repurposing in the context of pharmaceutical companies’ innovation policy: the methods and economic feasibility of repurposing drugs.
• Cancer: Disease Specifics and RNA-Based Detection The paper presents the analysis of cancer as one of the most common causes of death. It shows that there are many types of this disease.
• Stomach Cancer: Diagnosis and Treatment Stomach cancer is a malignant neoplasm that develops in the organ’s gastric mucosa cells and first affecting the epithelium and then growing into the stomach tissue.
• Breast Cancer: Diagnostic and Treatment Breast cancer is one of the most common oncology disorders among females. It has a complicated chain of immune reactions and various structures identified histologically.
• The Science Behind Obesity and Its Impact on Cancer The paper addresses the connection between cancer and physical activity, diet, and obesity in Latin America and the USA. The transitions in dietary practices may be observed.
• Thyroid Cancer as a Public Health Issue Due to the explosion and fire at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a huge quantity of radioactive iodine and cesium penetrated the air.
• EBP Guideline for the National Comprehensive Cancer Network The National Comprehensive Cancer Network clinical guidelines are the recognized standard and most synoptic evidence-based practice policies.
• The Ethics of Control Groups in Cancer Research A study is proposed to determine whether women with breast cancer who underwent a mastectomy have a higher rate of survival.
• Health-Related Misconceptions Regarding Antiperspirants and Breast Cancer There is a myth about the use of antiperspirants, especially aluminum-containing ones, as a risk factor for breast cancer.
• Physical Activity and Cancer Prevention Physical activity (PA) has to be efficient in preventing cancer, evading cancer repetition, and increasing good results.
• Social Determinants of Health and Cancer A larger population of the black community suffering from cancer loses their lives while receiving treatment at the hospital due to failed cancer care.
• Esophageal Cancer: Description, Population Affected, and Prognosis In esophageal cancer, malignant cells develop in the esophagus tissues, leading to tumor formation; it accounts for 1% of all malignancies diagnosed in the USA each year.
• Diet, Physical Activity, Obesity, and Related Cancer Risk One’s health is affected by their lifestyle, which should be well managed since childhood to set a basis for a healthier adulthood.
• The Cancer Trial: Useful Medical Tool A cancer trial is a tool that helps medical professionals examine and trace the illness to develop its background and establish treatment methods.
• Cancer Screening Promotion for Middle-Aged Adults Public health policy among middle-aged adults that promotes cancer literacy and the importance of frequent screenings is likely to yield positive results.
• Naturalistic Observation of Couples Coping With Breast Cancer Couples who are suffering with cancer and their spouses’ psychological well-being were explored in study, which focused on the natural setting and substance of dialogues.
• Passive Smoking and Pancreatic Cancer in Women The association between ETS and pancreatic cancer is weak. The pancreatic cancer risk associated is confounded by environmental tobacco smoke exposures.
• Breast Cancer: Preventive Measures and Support Methods One of the most common types of cancer that women encounter worldwide is breast cancer. This disease was the cause of approximately 570,000 deaths in 2015.
• Health & Medicine: Breast Cancer in XIX Century The disease of breast cancer was a disease of women, which began to be actively noticed from the beginning of the nineteenth century.
• Environmentally and Lifestyle Linked Cancer The paper argues it is critical to clearly understand the causes of cancer to avoid public misinformation that’s why the paper presents etiology and diagnosis of cancer.
• Lung Cancer Pathophysiology Like any other type of cancer, tumors in lungs have a characteristic of an uncontrolled cell growth that takes places in lung tissues.
• Cancer Insurance Evaluation An evaluation of what cancer insurance is, what it covers, how it works, the best providers, and how it differs from health insurance can facilitate a better sense of the policy.
• How to Lower your Cancer Risk. Nutrition Action Health Letter Cancer is the abnormal growth of cells. If a person is genetically predisposed to the disease, it can be difficult to avoid getting it.
• Herceptin and Breast Cancer Treatment Cancer growth is a series of processes that are driven by alterations of genes that bring about the progressive conversion of usual body cells into extremely malignant imitation.
• The Diagnosis and Staging of Cancer The essay describes the diagnosis of cancer. It also highlights three complications associated with cancer. The discussion offers a detailed approach towards better care of cancer.
• Breast Cancer: The Story of One Patient It is fascinating to trace the gradual transformation of a person throughout a history of the illness. The story of one patient who was diagnosed with breast cancer.
• HIV-AIDS, Nutrition and Cancer in Society Patients suffering from HIV/AIDS need to have a perfect schedule for their nutrition. It is important that they watch their diet to boost their immunity.
• Cancer Early Detection, Prevention, and Survivorship in Arab Countries This paper aims to analyze perception, attitudes, and practice towards cancer early detection, prevention, and survivorship in Arab countries and Oman.
• BRCA Gene Mutation and Breast Cancer This study aims to determine how BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 gene mutations contribute to breast cancer, to analyze the role of BRCA1 and BRCA 2 in the restoration of the damaged DNA.
• Postoperative Breast Cancer Care The chosen for the paper articles support the implementation of risk reduction strategies for depression in post-operative breast cancer patients.
• Public Health Initiative on Prostrate Cancer Among Maryland’s Blacks The primary goal of the public health initiative is to improve the quality of life for all people in the US and reduce the racial prostate cancer disparities.
• Researching of Testicular Cancer Men with undescended testicles are at increased risk of developing testicular cancer. If the undescended testicle is not in the groin but in the abdomen, the risk is even higher
• Lung and Bronchus Cancer in Smoking Americans Among the causes of lung and bronchus cancer, smoking is the first to be distinguished, which is the reason for the vast majority of incidence cases.
• Breast Cancer and Exercise. Article Summary The research study focused on breast cancer survivors in the Rocky Mountain Cancer Rehabilitation Institute (RMCRI) who had already been treated.
• Addressing Cancer: The Nursing Process Nurses must use as much information and resources as possible to offer the highest-quality patient-oriented care.
• Dental Caries Among Survivors of Childhood Cancer Some professionals considered caries to be one of the long-term health consequences experienced after cancer while others do not support such an idea.
• The Risk Factors of Breast Cancer This paper will throw light upon what breast cancer is all about, the risk factors, the distribution, and determinants of the same.
• A Collaborative Stress Management Initiative for Mothers of Cancer Children The article explored the psychological stress experienced by mothers who have cancerous children. The research is current and relevant to contemporary health issues.
• Multicausality: Reserpine, Breast Cancer, and Obesity All the factors are not significant in the context of the liability to breast cancer development, though their minor influence is undeniable.
• Reducing Cancer Risk With Diet and Lifestyle Change This paper explores the reasons why a strict diet together with changes in lifestyle could significantly reduce the risk of cancer.
• Understanding Epigenetic Mechanisms in Breast Cancer Human cells become cancerous when they undergo genetic modifications that make them acquire growth and multiplication advantages.
• Prostate Cancer Among the Blacks in the State of Maryland Empirical evidence reveals that race or ethnicity is the leading risk factor in the predisposition of men to prostate cancer.
• Breast Cancer: Etiology, Signs and Symptoms Breast cancer is believed to have claimed many human lives in the last four decades, but its prevalence rate has decreased significantly due to improved disease awareness.
• Factors of Older Adults’ Decision on Cancer Treatment Puts et al. conducted a qualitative study in order to establish the factors that affect the elderly in making a decision to accept or reject cancer treatment.
• Health Promotion to Reduce Lung Cancer: Grant Proposal Template The project aims to reduce the rate of lung cancer infection and deaths among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in South Australia.
• Optimal Care For Patients With All Forms of Cancer The nursing profession can benefit from several findings in this study. Optimal care for patients with all forms of cancer can indeed improve the quality of life.
• Breast Cancer: Pathophysiology, Types and Treatment Breast cancer is a common malignant neoplastic disease in women and mostly develops in the stage of women postmenopausal.
• “Identifying Dietary Patterns Compatible With the Reduction of Cancer Risk” Article Review The review analyzes the purpose of the study aimed at assessing the viability of building healthy eating guidelines in four international settings.
• Processed Meat Consumption Causes Pancreatic Cancer In the United States, more than 30,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer annually, whereas in Europe over 60,000 people suffer from pancreatic cancer yearly.
• Cancer Treatment and Role of Nurses The primary purpose of this paper is to draw attention to current issues related to the treatment of cancer and the role of nurses.
• Cancer Biology: Oncogenes and Tumor Suppressor Genes This paper seeks to interpret the role oncogenes and tumor suppressors play in transformation during cancer formation.
• Addressing Risk Factors for Lung Cancer Lung cancer cannot be pinpointed to a particular cause. The first prevention measure is ceasing smoking as cigarettes carry chemicals poisonous to the lungs.
• Wellness Programs for Colorectal Cancer In this plan, the researcher intends to give a clear intervention plan that can help address the problem of colorectal cancer that has affected so many elderly people in our society.
• Skin Cancer Types, Cells of Origin Melanoma is the severest form of skin cancer that grows quickly, and it can appear as a spot of a red, brown, black, or grey color with asymmetric sides.
• Breast Cancer: Research Review Paper Plenty of scholars’ investigations help doctors, nurses, and patients to take precautionary and care measures to improve their physical and psychological condition.
• Esophageal Cancer and Its Treatment The paper researches the causes of esophageal cancer, its various symptoms, diagnostic, treatment and possible ends.
• Approach to Cancer Care: Diagnosing and Treatment This paper will discuss the process of diagnosing and staging cancer, the complications that are common among patients, and the various treatment remedies available.
• Prostate Cancer Among Blacks in Maryland: Cost-Effectiveness Analysis In the context of the black community in Maryland, the cost-effectiveness analysis portrays the ability of the chosen intervention to minimize the consequences of prostate cancer.
• The Relationship Between Breast Cancer and Genes Cancer, in general, is a disease caused by genes that have mutated or adapted in a different way than was intended.
• Does Marijuana Use and Misuse Cause Cancer? The purpose of this paper is to review two studies that have attempted to define the possible link between marijuana use/misuse and lung cancer.
• Colorectal Cancer Intervention Model The unique skills needed are for successful colorectal cancer intervention includes knowledge of the behavioral challenges, interventions strategies, and health policies.
• How Cancer Affects the Skin? Melanoma represents a type of cancer that affects the melanocytes based in the epidermis section of the skin, and it presents itself as patches of lesions on the skin.
• Functional Characterization of MicroRNAs in Prostate Cancer Prostate cancer is the name given to cancer that starts in the prostate gland. The prostate is a part of the man’s reproductive system and is as big as a walnut.
• A Perfusion Based 3D Cancer Model for Micro Tumor Formation In vitro perfused 3D cancer model, developed in this thesis, proved valuable for cancer cell culture and related anti-cancer drug tests.
• Breast Cancer Development and Progression: Understanding Epigenetic Mechanisms The development and progression of breast cancer have been attributed to a series of cellular and molecular events, most of which are not well understood.
• Cervical Cancer: Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice This essay seeks to discuss the annual cervical cancer screening practice to identify the EBP that can be used to replace it.
• Impact of Alcohol Abuse on Breast Cancer Risk in Women This paper will examine the effects of alcohol abuse on the development of breast cancer in women to uncover its devastating consequences.
• Cancer Pain Experiences in Caucasians vs. Minorities Race, age, genetics, cancer type, culture, and psychosocial context have all been shown to impact the manner in which cancer patients experience pain during their illness.
• Cancer Treatment Practice Data Research Evidence-based practice in the nursing profession is fundamental towards effective delivery of care services to patients.
• Effects of Nutrition on Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease Control The high prevalence rate of cancer and heart disease has necessitated the need to underline not only the use of drugs but also the role of nutrition in eradicating cancer.
• Virtual Colonoscopy to Screen for Colon Cancer The aim of this paper is to estimate the technology of virtual colonoscopy from the perspective of several factors, for filling the mentioned gap with the proper amount of arguments.
• African American Women and Cancer The existing disparities regarding healthcare services provision in the United States is a critical issue related to such phenomena as racial and gender discrimination.
• Lung Cancer: Causes and Treatment In the current paper, the crucial peculiarities of lung cancer, as well as the reasons that cause it, will be discussed.
• Grant Proposal: Cancel Cancer To ensure that patients diagnosed with cancer can effectively reduce their stress and anxiety levels, a grant is needed to use the program of emotional relief.
• Socioeconomic Factors of Oral Cancer The significant probability of oral cancer being incident in unemployed people was high since the OR (odds ratio) is 2.27.
• Summaries of Three Articles About Lung Cancer One of the most straightforward and efficient ways to understand the pathogenesis of lung cancer is researching the molecular mechanisms that slowly initiate it.
• Cervical Cancer: Symptoms and Treatment Cervical cancer is a condition that affects the cells close to the vagina that can be located in the lower section of the uterus, which is called the cervix.
• Prophylaxis Breast Cancer This paper examines the majority of the parts in detail and considers every risk linked to the development of this dangerous disease.
• Expanded Treatment Options in the Adjuvant Therapy of Colon Cancer Nurses can make a difference in improving survival rates for stage III and IV patients by remaining up to date about treatment options offered by new adjuvant agents.
• Pancreatic Cancer: Diagnostics and Treatment The article analyses the most recent techniques in the diagnosis and management of pancreatic cancer malignancy with a very poor prognosis.
• Nutrition Research With Reference to Colorectal Cancer The present paper is concerned with evaluating the validity and reliability of nutrition research with reference to colorectal cancer.
• Nutritional “Cures” for Clients With Cancer or HIV-AIDS The paper analysis nutrition, which can play a pivotal role in providing some relief to patients especially those with HIV/AIDS.
• Breast Cancer: Analysis and Data Collection The study to determine the quality of health was a qualitative research study because it showed a significant improved in the quality of life for the breast cancer victims.
• Human Patient Simulation for Skin Cancer Prevention Kuhrik et al. conclude that human patient simulation (HPS) can benefit future healthcare providers and promote early prevention and detection.
• Type C Personality as a Risk Factor for Cancer The paper is on the scientific relationship between personality C and the aspects of gene and hormonal activity that leads to the build-up of cancer cells.
• The Disease of Breast Cancer: Definition and Treatment Breast cancer is a serious disease during which the breast cells experience abnormal growth. Females usually have a higher risk of developing the disease.
• Cancer and Humor in Children: Approach to Research The paper has discussed the factors that a researcher must consider when planning to investigate the relationship between the sense of humor and hospitalized childhood cancer stressors.
• Synthetic Lethality Approach as Used in Cancer Treatment The essay aims to demonstrate that Synthetic Lethality (SL) is an effective therapy that triggers two mutations in cancer cells that lead to cell death in the result.
• Virtual Colonoscopy – Colon Cancer Screening Virtual Colonoscopy is constantly becoming more and more popular, in comparison with the traditional approach and conventional colonoscopy in particular.
• Genetic Mechanism of Colorectal Cancer Colorectal Cancer (CRC) occurrence is connected to environmental factors, hereditary factors, and individual ones.
• Care of Breast Cancer-Related Lymphoedema The lymphoedema’s clinical manifestations include swelling of the upper or lower extremities, violation of skin nutrition, and subcutaneous fat tissue.
• Lung Cancer among Indigenous Australians A great number of severe diseases are widespread among the Indigenous Australian community. Cancer, especially lung cancer, is one of the most frequent cases.
• Spread of Respiratory Cancer and Ethnicity of the Patient Based on the descriptive statistics, it is possible to study how the spread of respiratory cancer and the ethnicity of the patient are related.
• The Use of Nanotechnology: Cancer Diagnostics and Treatment This article provides an overview of research and presentations on the use of nanotechnology for cancer treatment.
• Cancer: Definition, Epidemiology, and Pain Management Cancer is estimated to reveal itself in as many as 100 types. Statistically, in 2008 the mortality rate from cancer was at the level of 62%.
• A Family Experience of a Child Being Diagnosed With Cancer Family members of a child being diagnosed with cancer have to go through a long and complicated road that regrettably, not always leads to success.
• Women’s Disease: Breast Cancer and Its Consequence Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer types worldwide amounting to 25-30% of all cancer cases detected yearly among women.
• Listing Occupational Carcinogens and Cancer Prevention Occupational carcinogens make up bulk of the known human carcinogens. In the quest to define occupational carcinogens the number of staff exposed is of paramount importance.
• Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Guidelines: Lung Cancer The evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) target early detection of lung cancer in patients based on screening tools and techniques suggested by the recent literature.
• Cultural Sensitivity in Medicine and Cancer Treatment Any medical practitioner should understand the cultural aspects of a community for him to be able to come up with a lasting solution for cancer treatment.
• Racism in Breast Cancer Treatment Cancer treatment is the least studied field that arises numerous ambiguities and requires a more sophisticated approach in studying.
• Cancer Interference With Dna Replication Reports indicate that a greater percentage of human cancers originate from chemical substances as well as environmental substances.
• Skin Cancer, Its Causes and Preventive Measures Skin cancer is one of the most common of all cancers, therefore, society needs to know the risks involved and must be better educated when it comes to preventative measures.
• Understanding the Skin Cancer Causes and Protecting the Skin Exposure to too much sun can lead to skin cancer. If we do not change our habits majority of us will one time get skin cancer during our lifetime and many people will die from it.
• Cancer and Contemporary Therapeutic Approaches Cancer is a hazardous disease due to its potential lethality. This essay describes the basic traits of cancer and contemporary therapeutic approaches to the condition.
• Ethical Dilemma: Handling a Request for No Further Cancer Treatment Modern technologies can prolong a person’s life and interrupt it, and this is a person’s choice of which decision to make.
• Lung Cancer Early Screening in African Americans New communication policies should be incorporated into the healthcare system in the US to enhance annual CT screening for high-risk patients exposed to smoke and chemical poisons.
• “Preferences for Photographic Art Among Hospitalized Patients With Cancer” the Article by Hanson et al.
• “Preferences for Photographic Art Among Hospitalized Patients With Cancer” the Article by Grossman, A., Schroeter, K., Hanson, A. and Hanson, H.
• Computed Tomography and Related Cancer Risks
• Breast Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention
• Miami Breast Cancer Conference: Scholarly Activity
• Databases in Early Lung Cancer Screening
• Factors Influencing Breast Cancer Screening in Low-Income African Americans in Tennessee
• The Approach to the Care of Cancer
• Cancer: Approach to Care
• “A Culturally Tailored Internet Cancer Support Group for Asian American Breast Cancer Survivors”: Article Analysis
• Cancer Pain Management and Education Programs
• Depression in Female Cancer Patients and Survivors
• Cervical Cancer Intervention in Clinical Practice
• Skin Cancer in Latin American Population
• Breast Cancer and Stress Heightening
• Colorectal Cancer: Factors and Prevention
• Prevention of Breast Cancer
• Pain Management Issues in Cancer Patients
• Reactive Oxygen Species and Cancer Cells Relationship
• Anthem Blue Cross: Breast Cancer Screenings
• Cancer Care, Diagnostics and Complications
• Women’s Healthcare: Breast Cancer Prevention & Treatment
• Colon Cancer Among Male Hispanic Population
• Vomiting and Nausea in Patients with Gastric Cancer
• Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia and Prostate Cancer
• Breast Cancer Inheritance Biophysical Factors
• Cancer: Diagnosis and Treatment
• Gastric Cancer Treatment: Research Instrument
• Cancer Stages, Treatment and Side Effects
• Anxiety and Depression Among Females with Cancer
• Breast Cancer Screening Promotion
• Cancer Risk Factors: Biology Concepts
• Bladder Cancer, Its Mortality Trends and Projection
• Mindfulness-Based Music Therapy and Cancer Treatment
• Mammary Cancer: Health Screening Initiative
• Mammography Screening and Breast Cancer Mortality
• Skin Cancer: Examination and Prevention
• Cervical Cancer in the UK
• Cancer Effects Management Methods
• Cancer Burden and Prevention Strategies
• Mindfulness-Based Therapy for Cancer Patients
• Cervical Cancer Prevention Among British Women
• Breast Cancer Studies: Evaluation and Analysis of Scientific Papers
• Value Care of Cancer
• Community Cancer Screening and Detection Project
• Cancer Care Approaches: Diagnosis, Side Effects, and Treatment
• Music Therapy Effects for Breast Cancer Patients
• Gastric Cancer Treatment: Data Collection
• Cancer: Steps of the Implementation Plan
• Cervical Cancer Screening Methodology
• Endometrial Cancer Symptoms in Women After 35
• Birth Control Pills and Cervical Cancer Development
• Lung Cancer, Its Etiology Pathophysiology
• Who Work with Cancer Patients?
• Physical and Mental Care for Cancer Patients
• Cancer Diagnostics, Staging and Complications
• Breast Cancer: Disease Screening and Diagnosis
• Mindfulness-Based Music Therapy in Cancer Patients
• Prostate Cancer: African American Cancer Initiative
• Cancer Treatment Research: Informed Consent
• Possible Trends in the Cause of Cancer
• Cancer Diagnosis, Complications and Treatment
• Cancer Management: Effective Diagnosis, Treatment, Lessening the Effects of Complications
• Inner Strength in Women Survivors of Cancer
• From Breast Cancer to Zika Virus – Nursing Issues
• Postmenopausal Women with Breast Cancer
• Tanning Booths and Skin Cancer Relationship – Medicine
• A Research of Breast Cancer Survival
• Can Aspirin Help Reduce the Risk of Lung Cancer?
• What Are the Challenges for Relative Effectiveness Assessment and Early Access of Cancer Immunotherapies in Europe?
• Does Cellular Phone Use Contribute to Cancer Formation?
• Has Medical Innovation Reduced Cancer Mortality?
• Can Diet and Exercise Help Prevent Cancer?
• Does Detecting Breast Cancer with MRIs Increase the Rate of Mastectomies?
• How Are Cancer Cells Structurally Different From Normal?
• Can Elderly Patients With Pancreatic Cancer Gain Survival Advantages Through More Radical Surgeries?
• How Does Cancer Affect Individuals From All Backgrounds?
• Can Immunogenic Chemotherapies Relieve Cancer Cell Resistance to Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors?
• Does Diet Really Help Prevent Colon Cancer?
• Why Do African American Women Contract Breast or Cervical Cancer More Than Any Other Ethnic Group?
• How Does Cancer Form and Spread in the Human Body?
• Can Korean Red Ginseng Increase the Life Span of Cancer Patients?
• Does Natural Killer Cell Deficiency Increase the Risk of Cancer?
• Why Do Women Generally Get Breast Cancer Rather Than Other Cancers?
• Should the Cervical Cancer Vaccine for Girls Be Compulsory?
• Can Religion Help the Healing Process of Cancer?
• Does Green Tea Offer the Prescription for Beating Cancer?
• How Can Nanomedicine Help Cure Cancer?
• What Are the Symptoms and Treatments for Breast Cancer?
• Does Medicare Coverage Improve Cancer Detection and Mortality Outcomes?
• Are Pet Owners Really at Greater Risk of Cancer?
• How Can People Protect Themselves From Cancer?
• Does the Immune System Naturally Protect Against Cancer?
• Understanding cancer: causes, types, and risk factors.
• Complementary and alternative medicine for cancer patients.
• Environmental factors affecting cancer risk.
• The connection between cancer and aging.
• The role of artificial intelligence in cancer diagnosis.
• Strategies for improving quality of life after cancer treatment.
• Precision oncology: how it works.
• The significance of biomarkers in cancer diagnosis and prognosis.
• The role of diet in preventing and managing cancer.
• Ways to reduce cancer risks.
• Breast cancer awareness campaign: causes and prevention.
• Art therapy sessions for cancer patients.
• A healthy eating cookbook for a balanced diet during chemotherapy.
• Inspirational storytelling: collecting personal stories of cancer survivors.
• Raising awareness of the effects of smoking on cancer risk.
• Cancer prevention podcast: interviewing experts.
• Decision-making guide for cancer treatment for patients and their families.
• Surveying the impact of cancer treatment on patients’ daily lives.
• Volunteer-based transportation services for cancer patients.
• A social media campaign for raising awareness about cancer.

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Home > Books > Gynecologic Oncology

Topics on Cervical Cancer With an Advocacy for Prevention

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Academic Editor

Meenakshi Medical College Hospital and Research Institute , India

Published 02 March 2012

Doi 10.5772/1458

ISBN 978-953-51-0183-3

eBook (PDF) ISBN 978-953-51-6861-4

Copyright year 2012

Number of pages 296

Cervical Cancer is one of the leading cancers among women, especially in developing countries. Prevention and control are the most important public health strategies. Empowerment of women, education, "earlier" screening by affordable technologies like visual inspection, and treatment of precancers by cryotherapy/ LEEP are the most promising interventions to reduce the burden of cervical cancer.Dr ...

Cervical Cancer is one of the leading cancers among women, especially in developing countries. Prevention and control are the most important public health strategies. Empowerment of women, education, "earlier" screening by affordable technologies like visual inspection, and treatment of precancers by cryotherapy/ LEEP are the most promising interventions to reduce the burden of cervical cancer.Dr Rajamanickam Rajkumar had the privilege of establishing a rural population based cancer registry in South India in 1996, as well as planning and implementing a large scale screening program for cervical cancer in 2000. The program was able to show a reduction in the incidence rate of cervical cancer by 25%, and reduction in mortality rate by 35%. This was the greatest inspiration for him to work on cerrvical cancer prevention, and he edited this book to inspire others to initiate such programs in developing countries. InTech - Open Access Publisher plays a major role in this crusade against cancer, and the authors have contributed to it very well.

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Brain Cancer

Brain Cancer research articles are listed. Brain cancer news covers topics such as diagnosis, brain tumors, chemotherapy, gamma knife technology, brain cancer treatments, glioblastomas, stem cell research, neurosurgery, medicine, genetics, neurology, and other brain research.

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FDA approves brain cancer therapy that relies on Johns Hopkins genetic discovery

The drug, vorasidenib, targets a mutated gene identified in 2008 by hopkins cancer expert bert vogelstein and his team in collaboration with researchers at duke university.

By Hub staff report

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved a new drug for brain cancer that stems from a 2008 genetic discovery made by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center .

Image caption: Bert Vogelstein

This drug is for previously untreatable low grade IDH-mutant glioma, the most common malignant primary brain tumor in adults. This is the first major advance in decades for patients diagnosed with low grade gliomas, a malignancy of the brain's glial cells, which help control brain function, that occurs most commonly in younger adults. Low grade gliomas tend to be slower growing and are associated with longer survival than aggressive, high-grade brain cancers.

The drug, called vorasidenib, is a targeted cancer therapy that works by inhibiting the activity of a mutated gene called IDH, slowing the growth of the cancer. The gene was identified by Bert Vogelstein and team at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center's Ludwig Center in 2008 when, working with Duke University colleagues, they became the first to map the genetic blueprint for brain cancer. The blueprint was considered the most comprehensive genetic analysis for any tumor type, evaluating all known protein-encoding genes in brain cancer.

The researchers found that the IDH gene—which was never suspected to be involved in any tumor type—was frequently mutated in a subset of brain cancers.

"IDH is the poster child for cancer genome sequencing, and it illustrates the importance of basic research," says Vogelstein, professor of oncology and co-director of the Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins . "The history of medicine shows that when a disease is understood, it eventually becomes manageable. It may not be immediately evident, but in time, as in this case, such discoveries result in better treatment for patients."

Image credit : Elizabeth Cook

In June 2023, findings from a multicenter, phase 3 clinical trial of vorasidenib in 331 patients with IDH-mutant low grade glioma published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded:

• That patients with grade 2 IDH-mutant glioma who received the drug had significantly improved progression-free survival.
• That the therapy delayed the time to the next intervention compared to patients who received a placebo.

This phase 3 clinical trial was sponsored by the global pharmaceutical company Servier, which is bringing vorasidenib to market. The study showed that patients who received vorasidenib lived much longer without disease progression than participants who received a placebo.

"The discovery of the mutated IDH gene has become one of, if not the most important advancements in the entire field of neuro-oncology. Its use by the World Health Organization for accurate diagnosis and classification of malignant gliomas is groundbreaking and unparalleled," says longtime collaborator Darell Bigner , professor of neurosurgery at the Duke University School of Medicine and founding director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center. "The drug vorasidenib is the first effective new drug developed in the last 30 years for treating malignant gliomas. The brain tumor centers at Duke and Johns Hopkins provide amazing connections to patients for this kind of research and hopefully they can reap the benefits of this diagnostic and therapeutic advancement."

In addition to this newly FDA-approved drug, the IDH gene discovery led to a new classification of gliomas, differentiating cancers with an IDH mutation that have overall better outcome and response to treatment from very aggressive gliomas without an IDH mutation, including glioblastoma, the most common primary brain cancer in adults. It has also paved the way for additional studies in other types of brain cancer.

Treatments include surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible, followed by chemotherapy and radiation therapy to attack remaining cancer cells. In some patients, the use of the IDH inhibitor could delay the need for radiation and chemotherapy, which can damage healthy brain cells in the vicinity of the tumor and may render the tumor more aggressive over time.

"The possibility of delaying radiation therapy with this drug could be beneficial to select patients with slow growing IDH-mutant gliomas.," says Matthias Holdhoff , co-director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center brain tumor program and a co-investigator on the 2023 clinical trial. "I believe we are looking at a new standard of care option for these types of tumors."

Added Christy Wyskiel , who oversees commercialization at Johns Hopkins: "The distance between early discovery and the marketplace is enormous and treacherous for new medicines. We celebrate the movement of assets through clinical trials, but most fail along the way to meet our national standards of safety and efficacy. The FDA's announcement about the approval of vorasidenib is a rare and beautiful moment when we can truly say we have been successful in translating academic discovery for the benefit of human health."

Tagged cancer , brain cancer , bert vogelstein , technology ventures

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Link discovered between sensory neurons and spread of breast cancer: Anti-nausea medication may prevent it

by Rockefeller University

Cancer doesn't grow in a vacuum—each tumor grows in a particular microenvironment within the body and spreads through a tangled web of vasculature and nerves. Scientists have come to understand that the most potent therapies address cancer in context—accounting for both the tumor and the support structure that forms around it.

Now, a new paper in Nature reveals that the activation of sensory nerves within breast tumors is playing a critical role in promoting not only cancer growth but also its spread, known as metastasis.

The findings—that sensory neurons are secreting a neuropeptide that drives cancer growth and spread through a previously unknown neuro-cancer crosstalk—suggest that targeting this pathway may help stop breast cancer progression in its tracks. The study also determined that an FDA-approved drug commonly used to treat nausea may prevent metastasis in these instances.

"Hyperactivation of neurons has been observed for tumors growing in the brain, but this is the first time we've seen it in an epithelial tumor such as breast cancer," says Veena Padmanaban, a postdoctoral fellow in Sohail Tavazoie's lab and lead author of the study.

"This is an exciting discovery—no one has seen peripheral nerves release a signal to enhance metastasis before."

Getting on cancer's nerves

Scientists have long known a relationship exists between cancer cells and the nervous system . Solid tumors secrete proteins that recruit nerves to the primary tumor site.

Nerve cell markers have been detected in cancers of the head and neck, breast, cervix, esophagus, colorectum, and pancreas, and studies suggest that the nerves of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary processes such as heart rate and blood pressure, can help kickstart prostate and stomach tumors.

Whether the nervous system promoted the metastatic progression of breast cancer—the most common cancer worldwide—remained a mystery. But it seemed plausible. Healthy breast tissue is full of sensory nerves, and evidence of breast tumor innervation existed in the literature.

"We had evidence that innervation was associated with worse outcomes in breast cancer," says Tavazoie, the Leon Hess Professor at Rockefeller. "And when we finally looked at breast cancer tumors, we discovered that highly metastatic tumors had recruited much more sensory innervation."

With this observation in mind, the team used mouse models to compare innervation between highly metastatic and less metastatic tumors. They then cultured cancer cells alongside sensory neurons to study their effects on breast cancer cells in vitro, analyzed publicly available data to correlate nerve markers with metastatic recurrence in breast cancer patients, and then removed sensory nerves within breast tumors .

The results demonstrated that innervation drives metastasis. "We found that the nerves not only promote the growth of breast cancer cells—they also help cells metastasize and break into tissues better," Tavazoie says.

This alone was a key finding, because of the outsized role metastatic disease plays in cancer outcomes. "Metastasis is the main cause of death for most cancers—patients are dying because cancer spreads to distant organs," Padamanaban says. "Finding a way to stop metastatic disease is one of the greatest biomedical challenges of our time."

The neuro-cancer axis

As the team delved deeper, a more complete picture began to form. The researchers found that the enhanced innervation observed in aggressive tumors was driven by expression of the SLIT2 gene within the tumor vasculature, which encodes a protein involved in guiding the growth of axons to establish neural connections.

They determined that once the nerves enter the tumors, they begin to secrete a neuropeptide called substance P that promotes tumor growth and metastasis by interacting with the cancer cell receptor TACR1.

They also found that this interaction causes some cancer cells to die and release single stranded RNAs, which bind RNA sensing receptors on cancer cells to activate pro-metastatic genes that drive the rest of the cells forward.

"It had been reported that nerves can physically interact with certain cancer cells and directly influence them, but we observed a neuropeptide signaling mechanism, in which the nerves are releasing a neurotransmitter signal that diffuses to the breast cancer cells," Padmanaban says.

"We're also seeing that the neuropeptide acts on the cancer cells directly to activate an RNA signaling response, whereby the release of single stranded RNAs acts on nearby cells to activate a set of genes. That was unexpected and may have relevance that extends beyond cancer."

The findings have strong clinical implications.

Publicly available data suggests that elevated levels of the neuropeptide that promotes metastasis and gene signatures associated with this neuropeptide and ssRNA are all linked to increased metastasis and lower survival rates in breast cancer patients . And the team managed to impede the growth and metastasis of multiple models of breast cancer when they treated mice with aprepitant, an FDA-approved TACR1 antagonist normally given to chemotherapy patients to prevent nausea.

"Because aprepitant is already approved and safe, oncologists may consider clinical trials to test the impact of this medication on cancer progression in patients with breast cancer ," Tavazoie says.

Even if aprepitant doesn't offer the most effective treatment, the study gives researchers new therapeutic targets and opens the door to targeted therapies.

"Our work may help bridge the fields of cancer metastasis biology and neuroscience, encouraging cancer biologists and neuroscientists to work together and bring each field's tools to the table."

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