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RED WINE EXTRACT STOP CANCER GROWTH

Red wine ingredient resveratrol stops breast cancer growth

September 29th, 2011 in Cancer 

 Cheers! A new research report appearing in the October 2011 issue of The FASEB Journal shows that resveratrol, the "healthy" ingredient in red wine, stops breast cancer cells from growing by blocking the growth effects of estrogen. This discovery, made by a team of American and Italian scientists, suggests for the first time that resveratrol is able to counteract the malignant progression since it inhibits the proliferation of hormone resistant breast cancer cells. This has important implications for the treatment of women with breast cancer whose tumors eventually develop resistance to hormonal therapy.

"Resveratrol is a potential pharmacological tool to be exploited when breast cancer become resistant to the hormonal therapy," said Sebastiano Andò, a researcher involved in the work from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Calabria in Italy.

To make this discovery, Andò and colleagues used several breast cancer cell lines expressing the estrogen receptor to test the effects of resveratrol. Researchers then treated the different cells with resveratrol and compared their growth with cells left untreated. They found an important reduction in cell growth in cells treated by resveratrol, while no changes were seen in untreated cells. Additional experiments revealed that this effect was related to a drastic reduction of estrogen receptor levels caused by resveratrol itself.

"These findings are exciting, but in no way does it mean that should people go out and start using red wine or resveratrol supplements as a treatment for breast cancer," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "What it does mean, however, is that scientists haven't finished distilling the secrets of good health that have been hidden in natural products such as red wine."

More information: Francesca De Amicis, Francesca Giordano, Adele Vivacqua, Michele Pellegrino, Maria Luisa Panno, Donatella Tramontano, Suzanne A. W. Fuqua, and Sebastiano Andò. Resveratrol, through NF-Y/p53/Sin3/HDAC1 complex phosphorylation, inhibits estrogen receptor α gene expression via p38MAPK/CK2 signaling in human breast cancer cells. FASEB J. 2011 25:3695-3707; doi:10.1096/fj.10-178871

Provided by Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

 

"Red wine ingredient resveratrol stops breast cancer growth." September 29th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-09-red-wine-ingredient-resveratrol-breast.html

 

RED WINE EXTRACT STOP CANCER GROWTH

Red wine ingredient resveratrol stops breast cancer growth

September 29th, 2011 in Cancer 

 Cheers! A new research report appearing in the October 2011 issue of The FASEB Journal shows that resveratrol, the "healthy" ingredient in red wine, stops breast cancer cells from growing by blocking the growth effects of estrogen. This discovery, made by a team of American and Italian scientists, suggests for the first time that resveratrol is able to counteract the malignant progression since it inhibits the proliferation of hormone resistant breast cancer cells. This has important implications for the treatment of women with breast cancer whose tumors eventually develop resistance to hormonal therapy.

"Resveratrol is a potential pharmacological tool to be exploited when breast cancer become resistant to the hormonal therapy," said Sebastiano Andò, a researcher involved in the work from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Calabria in Italy.

To make this discovery, Andò and colleagues used several breast cancer cell lines expressing the estrogen receptor to test the effects of resveratrol. Researchers then treated the different cells with resveratrol and compared their growth with cells left untreated. They found an important reduction in cell growth in cells treated by resveratrol, while no changes were seen in untreated cells. Additional experiments revealed that this effect was related to a drastic reduction of estrogen receptor levels caused by resveratrol itself.

"These findings are exciting, but in no way does it mean that should people go out and start using red wine or resveratrol supplements as a treatment for breast cancer," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "What it does mean, however, is that scientists haven't finished distilling the secrets of good health that have been hidden in natural products such as red wine."

More information: Francesca De Amicis, Francesca Giordano, Adele Vivacqua, Michele Pellegrino, Maria Luisa Panno, Donatella Tramontano, Suzanne A. W. Fuqua, and Sebastiano Andò. Resveratrol, through NF-Y/p53/Sin3/HDAC1 complex phosphorylation, inhibits estrogen receptor α gene expression via p38MAPK/CK2 signaling in human breast cancer cells. FASEB J. 2011 25:3695-3707; doi:10.1096/fj.10-178871

Provided by Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology

 

"Red wine ingredient resveratrol stops breast cancer growth." September 29th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-09-red-wine-ingredient-resveratrol-breast.html

 

MALIGNANT COLON CANCER SUPPRESSOR FOUND

BVES butts heads with colorectal cancer

September 12th, 2011 in Cancer 

Once a cancer gains the ability to invade local tissues and spread to a distant site it becomes much harder to treat. A team of researchers, led by Min Chang and Christopher Williams, at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, has now identified the protein BVES as a suppressor of colorectal cancer progression to this dangerous state, leading them to suggest that BVES could be a therapeutic or preventative target in colorectal cancer.

Cancers originating from cells covering any of the external and internal surfaces of the body (epithelial cells) are known as epithelial cancers. If such cancers (e.g., colorectal cancer) are to become invasive and spread to distant sites in the body, some of the epithelial cancer cells must acquire the characteristics of a different cell type, a mesenchymal cell. Protein complexes that link epithelial cells together (junctional complexes) are regulators of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT).

Chang, Williams, and colleagues found that the junctional protein BVES regulates EMT in human colon cancer cells. Importantly, the team found that BVES expression was reduced in all stages of human colorectal carcinoma and that restoring BVES expression to normal decreased the in vitro and in vivo cancer cell characteristics of human colon cancer cells. These data provide the rational for the suggestion that targeting BVES could be of benefit to individuals with colorectal cancer.

More information: http://www.jci.org … 108a38a35e37

Provided by Journal of Clinical Investigation

 

LONG-TERM DISEASE FREE SURVIVAL POSSIBLE FOR SOME

Management of Peritoneal Carcinomatosis From Colorectal Cancer

http://www.oncologystat.com/journals/review_articles/YSONC/Management_of_Peritoneal_Carcinomatosis_From_Colorectal_Cancer.html

ABSTRACT

The management of peritoneal carcinomatosis from colorectal cancer is evolving. The introduction of new chemotherapeutic and biologic agents has certainly improved the outlook for many patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. Traditionally, patients with limited hepatic or pulmonary metastases were the only candidates for metastasectomy. However, patients with metastasis localized to the peritoneum have been shown to be candidates for metastasectomy with improved clinical outcomes. Cytoreductive surgery with the addition of hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) in this cohort of patients offers the only chance for long-term survival. Complete cytoreduction in combination with HIPEC for peritoneal surface disease has been demonstrated to produce survival outcomes similar to liver resection for hepatic metastases. This review will examine recent evidence pertaining to the evolving surgical oncology paradigm for management of colorectal peritoneal carcinomatosis.

Conclusions 

Long-term disease-free survival is possible in selected patients with peritoneal dissemination from colon carcinoma. While this aggressive therapy is formidable, it offers the best outcome for these patients who had previously been relegated to palliative therapy. Recently the American College of Surgeons Oncology Group (ACOSOG) initiated a, “Phase III Randomized Trial Comparing Standard Systemic Therapy to Cytoreduction + Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Mitomycin C + Standard Systemic Therapy In Patients With Limited Peritoneal Dissemination of Colon Adenocarcinoma.” The objectives of this study include to compare the overall survival of patients with advanced limited peritoneal dissemination of colon adenocarcinoma treated with systemic therapy with versus without cytoreduction surgery and hyperthermic intraperitoneal mitomycin-C. We support this and other future possible randomized studies, and are heartened by an organized effort to bring such trials to this modality.

CS and HIPEC for colorectal PC is a multimodality approach that has been established in investigational phase II trials and a single well-done phase III randomized trial to have therapeutic benefit. We approach PC similarly to isolated pulmonary or hepatic metastases, in which an aggressive surgical approach for complete resection is warranted. However, this approach should only be pursued in centers with demonstrated experts.  

 

COLON CELLS GROWN WITH STEM CELLS

Human Intestinal Stem Cell Breakthrough for Regenerative Medicine

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2011) — Human colon stem cells have been identified and grown in a petri dish in the lab for the first time. This achievement, made by researchers of the Colorectal Cancer Lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and published in Nature Medicine, is a crucial advance towards regenerative medicine.

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Throughout life, stem cells of the colon regenerate the inner layer of our large intestine in a weekly basis. For decades scientists had evidences of the existence of these cells yet their identity remained elusive. Scientists led by the ICREA Professor and researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) Eduard Batlle discovered the precise location of the stem cells in the human colon and worked out a method that allows their isolation and in vitro expansion, that is their propagation in lab-plates (petri dishes).

Growing cells outside the body generally requires providing the cells in a petri dish with the right mix of nutrients, growth factors and hormones. But in the same way that each of the more than 200 types of cells in our body differs from the others so too do optimal growing conditions for them in the lab. Consequently, human adult stem cell culture in labs has been practically impossible until now.

Batlle's team has also established the conditions for maintain living human colon stem cells (CoSCs) outside of the human body: "This is the first time that it has been possible to grow single CoSCs in lab-plates and to derive human intestinal stem cell lines in defined conditions in a lab setting," explains the IRB Barcelona researcher Peter Jung, first author of the study together with Toshiro Sato, from the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands.

The development, published by Batlle's research group in the journal Nature Medicine, arrives after more than 10 years of intense research focused on the characterization of the biology of the intestinal stem cells and its connection with cancer. The research has been made possible by close collaboration between Batlle's team and the group led by Hans Clevers at the Hubretcht Institute and University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands, and María A. Blasco at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid (Spain).

"For years, scientists all over the world have been trying to grow intestinal tissue in lab-plates; testing different conditions; using different nutritive media. But because the vast majority of cells in this tissue are in a differentiated state in which they do not proliferate, they survived only for a few days," explains Jung. "The aim of this study was to find a way to identify and select individual CoSCs and to grow them while maintaining their undifferentiated and proliferative state in lab conditions. Thus, we would be able to model how they grow -- in number -- and differentiate into normal intestinal epithelial cells in lab-plates," continues Jung. The scientific community now has a defined 'recipe' for isolating CoSCs and deriving stable CoSCs lines, which have the capacity to grow undifferentiated for months. In fact, "now we can maintain stem cells in a plate up to 5 months or we can induce these cells to differentiate artificially, as they do inside our bodies."

"This achievement opens up an exciting new area of research with the potential to bring about a huge breakthrough in regenerative medicine," says Jung. Regenerative medicine -- or the idea of repairing the body by developing new tissues and organs as the old ones wear out -- involves growing new cells from patients into tissues and organs in a lab. However, the main element for making regenerative medicine a reality, namely adult stem cells, are just starting to be understood. "Now that guidelines for growing and maintaining colon stem cells in the lab are in place, we have an ideal platform that could help the scientific community to determine the molecular bases of gastrointestinal cell proliferation and differentiation. It is also suspected that alterations in the biology of CoSCs are at origin of several diseases affecting the gastrointestinal tract, such as colorectal cancer or Crohn's disease, an autoimmune and inflammatory disorder. Our discovery also paves the way to start exploring this exciting field," finishes Jung.