News by Subject Medicine & Health

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) shed into the blood was discovered in the late 1940s but with rapid advances in genomics and computational analytics in just the past few years, researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center now believe that studying tags, or modifications to this type of DNA, may lead to a better understanding of how to assess, and possibly modulate, treatment approaches for cancer and other diseases. Their perspective, drawn from a review of studies to date, appears July 27 in Frontiers in Genetics.

A biomarker that has proven to be a predictor for response to immunotherapies in melanoma patients also has clinical relevance for breast cancer patients, according to a new study published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Survival rates for adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer have varied considerably depending on cancer type. A new study indicates that survival for multiple cancer types in such patients has improved in recent years, but some patients diagnosed with common cancer types still show limited survival improvements. The results are published by Wiley early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

A prospective cohort study found that quitting smoking after being diagnosed with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer may slow disease progression and decrease mortality. Given that about half of all smokers continue to smoke after a lung cancer diagnosis, these findings present an opportunity to improve overall and progression-free survival in this type of cancer. The study is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.