EliasHossain/CancerAbstracts huggingface dataset:
Category: Lung_Cancer
Reports of tumor regression after infection date back as far as 1550 bc. In the twentieth century, Dr. William Coley, witnessing regression of a malignant tumor in one of his patients after a bacterial infection, developed the first cancer treatment vaccine derived from killed bacteria, with some reported success. However, despite decades of research, no specific, active tumor vaccine has been approved for the treatment of cancer. In lung cancer, initial attempts to modulate the immune system with nonspecific therapies were unsuccessful. However, more sophisticated specific vaccines have now been developed, and an increasing number are being evaluated in randomized phase 3 trials, raising hopes that vaccines may be an additional novel therapy for patients with lung cancer. This article reviews the following seven vaccines, which have entered randomized trials: L-BLP25 (Stimuvax), BEC-2, 1E10, PF-3512676 (Promune), melanoma-associated antigen A3 immunotherapeutic, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor-transduced allogeneic cancer cellular immunotherapy, and belagenpumatucel-L (Lucanix).
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
Thyroid cancer is common but rarely deadly. Unfortunately, when the disease becomes refractory to radioactive iodine (RAI), few effective treatment options remain. This situation is changing, however, with the availability of multitargeted tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Cabozantanib and vandetanib, both recently FDA-approved for advanced or metastatic disease, have more than doubled progression-free survival in medullary thyroid cancer. New agents in the pipeline may yield even better outcomes, as discussed by Dr. Robert I. Haddad at the NCCN 18th Annual Conference.
Category: Colon_Cancer
Colorectal cancer is a common neoplasia with high morbidity and mortality. With endoscopy it is possible to identify its precursor lesion, the adenoma, and early localized cancer. Early detection and removal of adenomas can reduce the incidence and mortality of this disease. Studies using fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) and sigmoidoscopy for screening asymptomatic patients demonstrate a reduction in mortality from colorectal cancer. Colonoscopy, however, has the highest yield for detecting polyps. Most authorities and organizations now recommend screening the asymptomatic population over age 50 for colorectal neoplasia. The estimated cost of colon cancer screening is well within the benchmark figure of $40,000 per year of life saved, which is considered by the government to be cost effective. Controversies still exist regarding which colon cancer screening strategy is the most sensitive, specific, acceptable to the population, and cost effective. The American Cancer Society recommends a combination of FOBT and flexible sigmoidoscopy, but some experts believe that a one-time colonoscopy at age 60 may be a more cost-effective method. If the costs of colonoscopy are reduced, it is more cost effective than other techniques. Colonoscopy also may help to stratify at-risk patients, and those with negative initial colonoscopy may not need further screening. Advances in molecular biology may provide markers for screening or identifying people who are at high risk for colorectal neoplasia. This development may allow screening to be directed at high-risk groups.
Category: Lung_Cancer
Analysis was carried out according to stage and tissue type of 392 consecutive cases of lung cancer diagnosed at David Grant Medical Center between 1960 and 1974. Biphasic survival curves were described with a variable primary phase and a constant (1.1 percent per month) secondary phase. Survival was found to correlate both to histology and stage. The best survival was found in stage I bronchoalveolar carcinoma. Even in the more favorable categories a leveling off of survival was not found. This study strongly suggests that surgical treatment of lung cancer, while beneficial, cannot expect to be considered as a curative procedure in more than 10 percent of cases. Radiotherapy did not prolong survival.
Category: Lung_Cancer
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, and the majority of diagnoses are made in former smokers. Although avoidance of tobacco abuse and smoking cessation clearly will have the greatest impact on lung cancer development, effective chemoprevention could prove to be more effective than treatment of established, advanced-stage disease. Chemoprevention is the use of dietary or pharmaceutical agents to reverse or block the carcinogenic process and has been successfully applied to common malignancies other than lung (including recent reports on the prevention of breast cancer in high-risk individuals). Despite previous studies in lung cancer chemoprevention failing to identify effective agents, our ability to define the highest-risk populations and the understanding of lung tumor and premalignant biology continue to make advances. Squamous cell carcinogenesis in the bronchial epithelium starts with normal epithelium and progresses through hyperplasia, metaplasia, dysplasia, and carcinoma in situ to invasive cancer. Precursor lesions also have been identified for adenocarcinoma, and these premalignant lesions are targeted by chemopreventive agents in current and future trials. Chemopreventive agents can currently only be recommended as part of well-designed clinical trials, and multiple trials have recently been completed or are enrolling subjects.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
Thyroid cancer is one of the rarest forms of cancer, and yet there are wide variations in the degree of malignancy, ranging from the most rapidly fatal to the relatively benign. This difference depends almost entirely on the histological type. A "pool" of individuals with occult thyroid carcinomas (in the vast majority of the papillary type) is probably present in most populations even at a young age. Large differences in the estimated frequency of cancer at this site can therefore be caused by variation in diagnostic intensity. Data on changing trends of incidence and mortality are thus subject to reservation, depending on the degree to which they have been influenced by changing diagnostic criteria and the precision of histopathological description. Nevertheless, there is evidence that mortality is slowly falling, whereas incidence is increasing, in several countries. This chapter considers the upward temporal trends of incidence and substantially stable mortality rates for thyroid carcinoma in the past three decades and attempts to interpret these trends in the light of concurrent changes in diagnostic standards and histological classification. Attention will also be drawn to the public health implications of the recent intensive detection and treatment of occult thyroid carcinomas.
Category: Generic
When new technology is introduced into healthcare, novel ethical dilemmas arise in the human-machine interface. As artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and big data can exhaust human oversight and memory capacity, this will give rise to many of these new dilemmas.Technology has little if any ethical status but is inevitably interwoven with human activity and thus may serve to allow qualitative and quantitative disruption of human performance and interaction. We argue that personal integrity, justice of resource allocation and accountability of moral agency comprise three themes that characterize ethical dilemmas that arise with development and application of AI. These themes are important to address in parallel to further evolution of AI in health care for ethical practice of healthcare.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
Telemedicine is extremely useful when distance could hinder diagnostic procedures, disease management, or when severe side-effects may occur in patients not within easy reach of medical care and requiring prompt action and specific therapies. Telemedicine has been successfully adopted in the management of chronic patients, particularly in those with cardiologic or oncologic diseases. In the treatment of differentiated thyroid cancer, requiring long-term check-ups and visits as well as administration of high doses of levothyroxine (TSH - thyroid-stimulating hormone - suppression), also in elderly patients, telemedicine seems particularly indicated. Moreover, these distant monitoring techniques could not only reduce long-term management costs but also considerably decrease cardiovascular risks associated with these patients. The present review aims to provide some general information on telemedicine and its possible fields of action with regard to distant monitoring of patients with differentiated thyroid carcinoma.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
RET (rearranged during transfection) is a receptor tyrosine kinase involved in the development of neural crest derived cell lineages, kidney, and male germ cells. Different human cancers, including papillary and medullary thyroid carcinomas, lung adenocarcinomas, and myeloproliferative disorders display gain-of-function mutations in RET. Accordingly, RET protein has become a promising molecular target for cancer treatment.
Category: Lung_Cancer
Extensive research in genetics and genomics has revealed that lung cancer is a physiologically complex and genetically heterogeneous disease. Although molecular targets that can yield favorable response have been identified, those targets cannot be exploited due to the lack of suitable drug carriers. Furthermore, lung cancer often is diagnosed at an advanced stage when the disease has metastasized. Conventional treatments are not effective for treating metastatic lung cancer. Targeted therapeutics while beneficial has challenges that include poor tumor-targeting, off-target effects, and development of resistance to therapy. Therefore, improved drug delivery systems that can deliver drugs specifically to tumor will produce improved treatment outcomes. Exosomes have a natural ability to carry functional biomolecules, such as small RNAs, DNAs, and proteins, in their lumen. This property makes exosomes attractive for use in drug delivery and molecular diagnosis. Moreover, exosomes can be attached to nanoparticles and used for high precision imaging. Exosomes are now considered an important component in liquid biopsy assessments, which are useful for detecting cancers, including lung cancer. Several studies are currently underway to develop methods of exploiting exosomes for use as efficient drug delivery vehicles and to develop novel diagnostic modalities. This chapter summarizes the current status of exosome studies with regard to their use as theranostics in lung cancer. Examples from other cancers have also been cited to illustrate the extensive applicability of exosomes to therapy and diagnosis.
Category: Generic
This description of "soft robotics" is not intended to be a conventional review, in the sense of a comprehensive technical summary of a developing field. Rather, its objective is to describe soft robotics as a new field-one that offers opportunities to chemists and materials scientists who like to make "things" and to work with macroscopic objects that move and exert force. It will give one (personal) view of what soft actuators and robots are, and how this class of soft devices fits into the more highly developed field of conventional "hard" robotics. It will also suggest how and why soft robotics is more than simply a minor technical "tweak" on hard robotics and propose a unique role for chemistry, and materials science, in this field. Soft robotics is, at its core, intellectually and technologically different from hard robotics, both because it has different objectives and uses and because it relies on the properties of materials to assume many of the roles played by sensors, actuators, and controllers in hard robotics.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
In molecular pathology, predictive biomarkers identify which patients are likely to respond to targeted drugs. These therapeutic agents block specific molecules directly involved in cancer growth, dedifferentiation and progression. Until few years ago, the only targeted drugs available for advanced thyroid cancer included multi-tyrosine kinase inhibitors, mainly targeting the MAPK pathway and the angiogenic signaling. The administration of these drugs does not necessarily require a molecular characterization of tumors to assess the presence of predictive alterations. However, the availability of new selective targeted drugs for thyroid cancer patients is changing the diagnostic strategies for the molecular characterization of these tumors. The search for targetable alterations can be performed directly on tumor tissue by using a variety of methodologies, depending also on the number and type of alterations to test (i.e. single nucleotide variation or gene rearrangement). Herein, a comprehensive review of the currently available targeted treatments for thyroid cancer, related predictive markers and testing methodologies is provided.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
The management of patients with thyroid cancer can be optimized by developing multidisciplinary groups of highly specialized individuals. The completeness of surgery and its morbidity are mostly surgeon-dependent. Similarly, the decisions regarding selection of adjuvant treatments, doses, follow-up schemes, and so forth require depth of knowledge and understanding of the disease; its variables; factors that govern its course; and the values, limitations, and side effects of alternative therapies.
Category: Colon_Cancer
The Cox proportional hazards model is the most widely used model for survival analysis because of its simplicity. The fundamental assumption in this model is the proportionality of the hazard function. When this condition is not met, other modifications or other models must be used for analysis of survival data. We illustrate in this review several methodological approaches to deal with the violation of the proportionality assumption, using survival in colon cancer as an illustrative example.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
Thyroid carcinoma is a rare and heterogeneous disease. Initial therapy and follow-up has to be adjusted to the individual risk for an excellent vs. poor prognosis. Differentiated thyroid cancer has a very high cure rate and is treated by surgery, usually followed by radioiodine ablation. Depending on the response to initial therapy the risk for persisting or recurrent disease should be re-evaluated. Continued TSH suppressive levothyroxine therapy is only recommended in high-risk patients. In contrast, metastatic radioiodine-refractory thyroid cancers have a poor prognosis and may benefit from multidisciplinary treatment concepts including tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Due to its complexity, management of thyroid cancer patients should be performed in close collaboration with a specialized thyroid cancer team.
Category: Colon_Cancer
Although interleukin-17A (IL-17A) facilitates colon cancer development, its target cells remain elusive. In this issue of Immunity, Wang et al. (2014) now demonstrate that IL-17A receptors on the intestinal epithelium promote progression of APC mutant adenomas associated with IL-6 expression and that IL-17A confers chemotherapy resistance.
Category: Generic
In this full review paper, the recent emerging trends in Educational Data Science have been reviewed and explored to address the recent topics and contributions in the era of Smart Education. This includes a set of rigorously reviewed world-class manuscripts addressing and detailing state-of-the-art, frameworks and techniques research projects in the area of Data Science applied to Education, using different approaches such as Information Fusion, Soft Computing, Machine Learning, and Internet of Things, among others. Based on this systematic review, we have put some recommendations and suggestions for researchers, practitioners and scholars to improve their research quality in this area.
Category: Thyroid_Cancer
In a study of 136 differentiated thyroid cancer patients referred for radioiodine therapy since January 1991, it was observed that 80 patients had metastatic disease. Of them, 51 had elevated levels of thyroglobulin (Tg), and of these 51 there were 15 patients who had functioning metastases with evidence of thyroid hormone synthesis by these metastases. All but 1 of these 15 cases with normal hormone levels in the circulation were follicular carcinomas with skeletal metastases. The response of these patients to radioiodine was poor. The group of patients with high Tg levels but low hormone synthesis and low circulating hormones responded better to radioiodine. Patients with low Tg levels and low hormone synthesis showed good response to radioiodine--especially patients with residual thyroid tissue after surgery and those with nodal disease.
Category: Colon_Cancer
The cause of the high incidence of methane producers in patients with colorectal cancer is not clear. A total of 270 individuals were studied for methane production, using an end-expiratory breath sampling technique. They were divided into eight groups: 156 healthy controls (group 1); 47 patients with colorectal cancer (group 2); 36 patients (34 of them included in the previous group) after resection of the tumor (group 3); 7 (also included in group 2) with nonresectable tumor (group 4); 29 with nonmalignant diseases of the colon (group 5); 12 with extensive ulcerative colitis (group 6); 12 with ulcerative proctosigmoiditis (group 7); and 12 with colonic polyposis (group 8). Significantly more patients (91.4%) with colorectal cancer in group 2 produced methane than either healthy controls (42.9%) (p less than 0.001) or patients with benign diseases of the colon (41.3%) (p less than 0.001). In 36 patients (group 3) in whom the cancer was resected, the incidence of methane producers fell to 47.2%, similar to the control group, but significantly different from group 2 (p less than 0.001). The percentage of methane producers in patients operated on, but with unresectable cancer, remained very high (87.7%). A significantly higher proportion of patients with extensive ulcerative colitis (group 6) and colonic polyposis (group 7) produced methane than patients with ulcerative proctosigmoiditis (group 7), benign diseases of the colon (group 5), and healthy controls (p less than 0.05). The results suggest that the presence of cancer in the large bowel directly influences methane production. In addition, in the group of diseases with a high risk of malignancy, the prevalence of methane-producing individuals was significantly higher than in the healthy population and in patients with benign diseases of the colon.
Category: Lung_Cancer
Aggressive carcinomas tend to adopt behaviors normally restricted to lymphocytes, including anchorage-independent mobilization, response to chemokines, and modulation of local inflammatory conditions. In a recent study we identified the lymphocyte-restricted chromatin regulator Aiolos as an epigenetic driver of lymphocyte mimicry in lung cancer that links immune cell development to metastatic behavior.
Category: Colon_Cancer
Diet and lifestyle modification offers means of reducing risk of developing colon cancer. Current data suggest that consuming a Western style diet, that is, one high in meat, refined grains, and sugar and low in vegetables and fiber, may contribute to risk of colon cancer. There also are data to support a reduction in colon cancer risk from consuming high levels of calcium and folate. Energy balance and maintaining an appropriate body weight have been associated with a reduced risk of colon cancer. An important part of the energy balance equation is physical activity. High levels of physical activity have consistently been identified as being associated with a reduced risk of colon cancer. It is estimated that 13% of colon cancer can be attributed to being physically inactive, 12% of colon cancer can be attributed to eating a Western style diet, and 8% of colon cancer can be attributed to having a first degree relative with colorectal cancer.
Category: Colon_Cancer
Colorectal cancer is a major health problem in the western world and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Diet makes a significant contribution to the disease, with high fat, low fibre diets correlating positively with a high incidence of colorectal cancer. Intracellular polyamine concentrations and ornithine decarboxylase activity are both increased in colorectal cancer tissue and in premalignant polyps. Measurement of the polyamine content of serum and urine of individuals has been proposed as a diagnostic marker of malignancy but a number of false positives make this idea untenable. There may, however, still be a role for the measurement of urinary polyamine content as a means of monitoring the efficacy of therapy. Inhibition of polyamine metabolism by polyamine analogues or by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs may be useful in the chemotherapy and/or chemoprevention of colorectal cancer. Preliminary results suggest that a low polyamine diet might be helpful as part of a health care plan for cancer patients.
Category: Lung_Cancer
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the number one cancer killer and its early detection can reduce mortality. Accumulating evidences suggest an etiopathogenic role of microorganisms in lung tumorigenesis. Certain bacteria are found to be associated with NSCLC. Herein we evaluated the potential use of microbiome as biomarkers for the early detection of NSCLC. We used droplet digital PCR to analyze 25 NSCLC-associated bacterial genera in 31 lung tumor and the paired noncancerous lung tissues and sputum of 17 NSCLC patients and ten cancer-free smokers. Of the bacterial genera, four had altered abundances in lung tumor tissues, while five were aberrantly abundant in sputum of NSCLC patients compared with their normal counterparts (all p < 0.05). Acidovorax and Veillonella were further developed as a panel of sputum biomarkers that could diagnose lung squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) with 80% sensitivity and 89% specificity. The use of Capnocytophaga as a sputum biomarker identified lung adenocarcinoma (AC) with 72% sensitivity and 85% specificity. The use of Acidovorax as a sputum biomarker had 63% sensitivity and 96% specificity for distinguishing between SCC and AC, the two major types of NSCLC. The sputum biomarkers were further validated for the diagnostic values in a different cohort of 69 NSCLC cases and 79 cancer-free controls. Sputum microbiome might provide noninvasive biomarkers for the early detection and classification of NSCLC.
Category: Colon_Cancer
Colon cancer is a major human cancer accounting for about a tenth of all cancer cases thus making it among the top three cancers in terms of incidence as well as mortality. Metastasis to distant organs, particularly to liver, is the primary reason for associated mortality. Chemokines, the chemo-attractants for various immune cells, have increasingly been reported to be involved in cancer initiation and progression, including in colon cancer. Here we discuss the available knowledge on the role of several chemokines, such as, CCL2, CCL3, CCL5, CXCL1, CXCL2, CXCL8 in colon cancer progression. CCL20 is one chemokine with emerging evidence for its role in influencing colon cancer tumor microenvironment through the documents effects on fibroblasts, macrophages and immune cells. We focus on CCL20 and its receptor CCR6 as promising factors that affect multiple levels of colon cancer progression. They interact with several cytokines and TLR receptors leading to increased aggressiveness, as supported by multitude of evidence from in vitro, in vivo studies as well as human patient samples. CCL20-CCR6 bring about their biological effects through regulation of several signaling pathways, including, ERK and NF- B pathways, in addition to the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Signaling involving CCL20-CCR6 has profound effect on colon cancer hepatic metastasis. Combined with elevated CCL20 levels in colon tumors and metastatic patients, the above information points to a need for further evaluation of chemokines as diagnostic and/or prognostic biomarkers.