Injection of the drug CBLB502 has the potential to protect a cancer patient’s healthy cells during radiation treatment.
At least in mice and monkeys’ study, it worked that way!
Mice and monkeys exposed to normally-lethal doses of radiation treatment have lived longer after being injected with the drug CBLB502.
Radiotherapy is used to kill cancer-infected cells through radiation. However, the treatment also kills healthy cells surrounding the cancer-affected area through a biological suicide mechanism, or apoptosis.
The biological suicide is a reaction activated by the body in order to stop the multiplication of damaged DNA and cells. Radiotherapists must balance targeting too much radiation …read more

According to scientists at the University of Southern California (USC), in collaboration with Italian researchers, fasting (for 48 hours) before receiving chemotherapy could help limit the treatment’s toxic effects to cancer cells—and spare healthy ones.
Starving healthy cells helps to differentiate them from tumor cells, a trick that could make cancer treatments more effective.
The new finding may pave the way for higher and more frequent chemo doses that better shrink tumors without harming normal cells.
Any thoughts on the matter? I’d like to hear them.
Find more details from Scientific American.

Antioxidants in grape skins and red wine can kill pancreatic cancer cells by getting into the center of the cell’s energy – the mitochondria- thereby disabling its function.
Such were the findings of a team from University of Rochester Medical Center.
The new study also showed that when the pancreatic cancer cells were doubly assaulted — pre-treated with the antioxidant, resveratrol, and irradiated — the combination induced a type of cell death called apoptosis, an important goal of cancer therapy.
Although red wine consumption during chemotherapy or radiation treatment has not been well studied, it is not “contraindicated,” Okunieff said. In other words, …read more

A research team at Howard Hughes Medical Institute headed by Brian J. Druker has developed, in pursuit of personalized medicine, a new technique in identifying previously unknown genetic mutations that trigger growth of cancer cells.
Inside cells of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the researchers have dramatically reduced the time it takes to pinpoint molecular abnormalities that might be vulnerable to specific drug treatments by analyzing the proteins instead of the genes.
“This approach gives us a way to figure out what’s driving the growth of a cancer in an individual patient and ultimately match that patient with the right drug,” said Druker, …read more