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Pseudogenes are genes that have accumulated so many mutations that they can’t code for or create proteins any more.

Now, scientists at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre have shown that characterising a cancer patient’s catalogue of pseudogenes can not only reveal what sub-type of tumour they have, but can also predict how they will respond to therapy and what their survival rate might be.

This creates an exciting new opportunity for the development of new prognostic tools that can potentially be used on a patient-by-patient basis.

Image credit: ynse via flickr.

Repost from the Stojdl Lab blog.

Scientists at Arizona State University have moved closer towards a universal immunosignature diagnostic platform for cancer.

Publishing in the journal PNAS, they describe the use of a platform that applies antibodies circulating in the blood of cancer patients to a large microarray of random peptides. Those antibodies that bind to one or more peptide are then characterised to create an “immunosignature” for each individual patient.

When the immunosignatures of multiple patients are compared, it becomes possible to pick out common peptides that keep cropping up. These could form the basis of a diagnostic test for cancer that would only require a drop of a patient’s blood. It may also be possible to use these peptide immunosignatures to inform the most effective type of cancer treatment.

In the figure above, the expression levels of two immunostimulatory peptides are determined for 1516 cancer patients across 15 different cancer types. Peptide 1 shows high expression in 3 classes of cancer (10, 13 & 15), while peptide 1 is only expressed at high levels in 1 class of cancer (11).

Image credit: Stafford et al. 2014.

Repost from the Stojdl Lab blog.

Regulatory T cells, or Tregs, are immune cells that are typically considered bad news for cancer patients. That’s because these cells are immunosuppressive, and can prevent the patient’s own immune cells from attacking and clearing their tumour. Essentially, the Tregs are recruited by the tumour to act as a protective shield.
Yet new research from scientists in China suggests that Tregs aren’t always bad. In some cancers, the presence of many Tregs in the tumour can actually correlate with improved survival.

Taken directly from their new paper, the risk graph above shows that patients with cervical, renal, skin, liver, gastric and breast tumours that were densley packed with FoxP3+ Tregs had a significantly shorter overall survival (their odds of survival, which is numerically considered along the horizontal axis, was lower). Yet increased infiltration of FoxP3+ Tregs was associated with an improvement in the odds of survival for patients with colorectal, head and neck, and oesophageal cancer.

Image credit: Shang et al. 2015.

Repost from the Stojdl Lab blog.