While bioengineers have long used chemical properties of a cell to deliver treatment drugs, a team of Penn State researchers suggest they can use the mechanical properties of diseased cells, such as metastatic cancer cells, to help improve delivery of drug treatments to the targeted cells. The mechanotargeting may one day lead to improved cancer treatments.
A new $5.5 million addition to the Penn State Health St. Joseph Cancer Center to open by year’s end will offer people in the Berks region faster, more targeted radiation treatments close to home.
Most brain cancers start elsewhere in the body, but one particularly aggressive and uncommon form — glioblastoma — originates in the brain itself.
A compound made from grape skins and grape seeds killed colon cancer stem cells in mice, according to researchers. The study, along with previous studies on the low incidence of colon cancer in populations that tend to eat plants, may also offer clues to the role that foods play in suppressing and treating cancer.
For cancer patients, the most dreaded piece of news is that the disease has spread. "Ninety percent of patients die because of metastasic tumors, not the primary tumor," says Siyang Zheng, assistant professor of bioengineering at Penn State. Now, work by an interdisciplinary team led by Zheng may give patients a better chance of survival after their tumors have metastasized. Zheng's team is developing a device that may help monitor circulating tumor cells, or CTCs.
A cancer therapy that removes malignant cells from a patient's cerebrospinal fluid may soon be available to prevent metastases and decrease complications of cancers involving the brain, according to Penn State medical researchers.
Tumors that do not respond to chemotherapy are the target of a cancer therapy that prevents the function of two enzymes in mouse tumor cells, according to Pennsylvania medical researchers.
Mount Nittany Medical Center's new Trilogy Stereotactic System combines sophisticated state-of-the-art imaging with ultra-precise, non-invasive cancer treatment technologies.
