Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center

The April program for My Health Chat will be the promising world of cancer drug discovery. Panelists will be Lawrence Marnett, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology, and Stephen Fesik, Ph.D., director of drug discovery at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. They will be discussing and taking questions about how information about the genetic [...]

Smoking contributes to the vast majority (around 85 percent) of lung cancer cases. The TGF-beta signaling pathway – which regulates cell growth and proliferation – is altered in several cancer types, but little is known about how smoking affects this pathway. To investigate this, Debangshu Samanta, Pran Datta, Ph.D., and colleagues exposed human lung epithelial [...]

Understanding DNA replication and DNA damage responses – which must proceed faithfully to prevent diseases such as cancer – requires the ability to monitor protein dynamics at active and damaged replication forks (sites of DNA duplication). Existing methods for studying replication fork machinery have been limited in resolution and sensitivity. Now, David Cortez, Ph.D., and [...]

Colon cancer development and progression involves alterations in several cell signaling pathways. Activation of the Wnt pathway is involved in the early stages of tumor development, while inactivation of signaling through the TGF-beta pathway (which typically suppresses tumor formation) is involved in later stages. However, the interactions between these pathways remain unclear. R. Daniel Beauchamp, [...]

Kathy Leiser first heard about Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center’s lung cancer screening trial through a sponsorship ad on WPLN radio last summer. The Nashville office technology saleswoman and grandmother of three had stopped smoking in 2009, but she knew her smoking history put her at risk for lung cancer. So she enrolled in the screening trial, [...]

About half of colorectal tumors express elevated levels of COX-2, the key enzyme responsible for generating prostaglandins that promote cancer development. Prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) is likely the primary mediator of most of COX-2’s tumor-promoting effects, and the PGE2 metabolite, PGE-M, can be measured noninvasively in urine. To assess the utility of PGE-M as a biomarker [...]

When the double-stranded “rope” of DNA is unwound to be copied, it can become knotted or tangled. The enzyme topoisomerase II detangles DNA by cutting both strands, removing the tangles, and stitching the DNA back together. Because breaks in the DNA can lead to genetic mutations and cell death, topoisomerase II is a target of [...]

A few years ago, Alison Hanson, Ph.D., a student in Vanderbilt’s Medical Scientist Training Program, was invited to have lunch with a visiting Nobel laureate, Aaron Ciechanover, M.D., D.Sc. Hanson was working on her dissertation research at the time, and she described some interesting findings to Ciechanover. “He said, ‘that could either be a total [...]

Investigators from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and 12 other centers in the United States and Australia have found that a new drug for patients with metastatic melanoma nearly doubled median overall survival. More than half of patients who were treated with the novel drug vemurafenib, known commercially as Zelboraf, responded to treatment and experienced an impressive [...]

We hope you will join us for a town hall meeting about non-small cell lung cancer on March 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the Millenium Maxwell House Hotel on Rosa Parks Blvd. This activity is intended for oncologists, pathologists, pulmonologists, and other clinicians involved in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The forum [...]