Chemotherapy can speed up cancer spread, Chinese study finds
Common treatment can wake up dormant cancer cells, causing the disease to spread from original sites to other organs, team discovers
Their findings shed light on why breast cancer patients can experience cancer metastasis in organs like the lungs despite successful treatment of their primary tumours.
The team also found that the use of specific drugs in combination with chemotherapy could be used to inhibit this process in mice, and a clinical trial is already under way in breast cancer patients.
How tests that detect cancer DNA fragments in blood can kickstart earlier treatment
A study shows that ctDNA tests can detect tumours up to three years before before traditional testing methods would have picked them up
Cancer doctor and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee describes how surprised scientists were to discover DNA drifting freely in blood plasma almost 80 years ago.
“The finding defied biological orthodoxy,” he writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
“DNA was thought to remain locked inside the nuclei of cells, and not float around on its own. Stranger still, these weren’t whole genomes but broken pieces – genetic flotsam cast adrift from an unknown source.”
