Euractiv: EU Commission to create common oncology imaging database. “The European Commission launched its European Cancer Imaging Initiative on Monday (23 January), which aims to create a common digital infrastructure across the EU to facilitate data sharing on the disease.”
Penn Medicine News: Machine Learning-Triggered Reminders Improve End-of-Life Care for Patients with Cancer. “Electronic nudges delivered to health care clinicians based on a machine learning algorithm that predicts mortality risk quadrupled rates of conversations with patients about their end-of-life care preferences… The study also found that the machine learning-triggered reminders significantly decreased use of aggressive chemotherapy and other systemic therapies at end of life.”
KTH Royal Institute of Technology: New database maps proteins that could predict cancer. “Announced by KTH Royal Institute of Technology Professor Mathias Uhlén, the new open-access Disease Blood Atlas provides a first-ever map of the proteome signature in blood from cancer patients. The Disease Blood Atlas highlights 1,463 proteins associated with 12 different types of cancer, and presents proteins that can be used to identify individual cancer types based on a drop of blood.”
Newswise: AI model using daily step counts predicts unplanned hospitalizations during cancer therapy. “An artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by researchers can predict the likelihood that a patient may have an unplanned hospitalization during their radiation treatments for cancer. The machine-learning model uses daily step counts as a proxy to monitor patients’ health as they go through cancer therapy, offering clinicians a real-time method to provide personalized care.”
Penn State News: Researchers 3D bioprint breast cancer tumors, treat them in groundbreaking study. “Researchers at Penn State have successfully 3D bioprinted breast cancer tumors and treated them in a breakthrough study to better understand the disease that is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide.”
Cornell Chronicle: New technique boosts online medical search results. “A Cornell-led group of researchers has developed a search method that employs natural language processing and network analysis to identify terms that are semantically similar to those for cancer screening tests, but in colloquial language.”
Inside Precision Medicine: Moffitt Creates Open-Source Software for Viewing Multiplex Images. “Researchers at the Moffitt Cancer Center have created a new open-source software program that allows users to view multiple 2D images simultaneously. Their program, called Mistic, takes information from multidimensional images to create an abstract of each that can be viewed together. A paper in the journal Patterns describes the program and several applications in cancer imaging.”
Sanger Institute: World’s largest database for predicting cancer treatment response based on cancer proteins . “Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) in Sydney, Australia, have completed a protein map for 949 cancer cell lines across over 40 cancer types, which have been tested with 650 different treatments. Advanced computational methods were then used to predict the response of cancer cells to treatment.”
MIT Technology Review: Facebook is bombarding cancer patients with ads for unproven treatments. “Evidence from Facebook and Instagram users, medical researchers, and its own Ad Library suggests that Meta is rife with ads containing sensational health claims, which the company directly profits from. The misleading ads may remain unchallenged for months and even years. Some of the ads reviewed by MIT Technology Review promoted treatments that have been proved to cause acute physical harm in some cases. Other ads pointed users toward highly expensive treatments with dubious outcomes.”
University of Kentucky: Markey Cancer Data Portal Provides Digital Footprint of Cancer in Kentucky. “The University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center’s Community Impact Office recently launched Cancer InFocus: Kentucky – a new, online data mapping application that allows users to explore cancer incidence and mortality data alongside population demographics, social determinants of health and behavioral risk factors at various geographic levels across the Commonwealth.”
University of Kentucky: Multimedia Project Spotlights Cancer Burden in Appalachia. “‘Appalachia’s Burden’ is a new online project created through a collaboration between the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center’s Appalachian Career Training in Oncology (ACTION) Program and Western Kentucky University’s (WKU) photojournalism program. The goal of the collaboration is to bring Appalachia cancer patients’ stories to life.”
Medical Xpress: New database to ‘SpUR’ on cancer research. “The new resource, named SpUR (short for Splicing in Untranslated Regions) and freely available online, details more than 1,000 splicing events found frequently in cancers in noncoding regions of mRNA located just downstream of protein-coding stop signals. The sites and expression levels of these events are cataloged and visualized for nearly 8,000 samples across 10 cancer types and corresponding normal tissues. With the tool, independent research teams can now further probe the role of individual splice events in cancer development and progression.”
Cancer Research: ROADMAPS: An online database of response data, dosing regimens, and toxicities of approved oncology drugs as single agents to guide preclinical in vivo studies. “The Biological Testing Branch (BTB) of the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) has evaluated more than 70 FDA-approved oncology drugs to date in human xenograft models. Here, we report the first release of a publicly available, downloadable spreadsheet, ROADMAPS (Responses to Oncology Agents and Dosing in Models to Aid Preclinical Studies)… that provides data filterable by agent, dose, dosing schedule, route of administration, tumor models tested, responses, host mouse strain, maximum weight loss, drug related deaths, and vehicle formulation for preclinical experiments conducted by the BTB.”
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Cancer FactFinder website launched to provide fact-based, reliable information about causes of cancer. “A team led by the Zhu Family Center for Global Cancer Prevention at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Center for Cancer Equity and Engagement at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center has launched Cancer FactFinder (https://cancerfactfinder.org/), a new website that provides accurate and reliable information about what does and does not cause cancer.”
KnowTechie: No, cell phones don’t give you brain tumors, study finds. “Ever since cell phones became popular decades ago, there has been concern about their effect on our bodies. Specifically, there has been a lot of speculation that cell phone radiation could increase the risk of brain tumors. However, recent findings from a long-term study indicate no relationship between cell phone use and brain cancer.”
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