HPV vaccine highly effective against multiple cancer-causing strains

According to a multinational clinical trial involving nearly 20,000 young women, the human papilloma virus vaccine, Cervarix, not only has the potential to prevent cervical cancer, but was effective against other common cancer-causing human papillomaviruses, aside from just the two HPV types, 16 and 18, which are responsible for about 70 percent of all cases. That effectiveness endured for the study’s entire follow-up, of up to four years. The research was published in Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.”The study confirms that targeting young adolescent girls before sexual debut for prophylactic HPV vaccination has a substantial impact on the incidence of high grade cervical abnormalities,” said corresponding author, Dan Apter, Director, The Sexual Health Clinic, Family Federation of Finland, Helsinki.The vaccine was extremely effective in young women who had never been infected with HPV. It protected nearly all from HPV-16 and -18, and protected 50-100 percent against different grades of precancerous transformation of cervical cells caused by other strains of HPV, including up to 100 percent of those with the immediate precursor grade to cancer. The women were followed for up to four years post-vaccination.

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Glioblastoma: Study ties 3 genes to radiation resistance in recurrent tumors

A new study identifies three genes that together enable a lethal form of brain cancer to recur and progress after radiation therapy.The findings might lead to new therapies that target cancer stem cells, say researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James), who led the study.The work focused on the brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). It investigated a subset of cancer cells within those tumors that behave like stem cells and that sometimes survive radiation therapy. To understand how those cancer stem-like cells survive irradiation, the researchers examined the cancer-related gene EZH2, which is unregulated in GBM and other cancers.They discovered that in GBM stem-like cells – but not in other tumor cancer cells or in healthy body cells – EZH2 is regulated/controlled by a gene called MELK in combination with a second gene, FOXM1. The interaction of the three genes helps the cells survive therapy.

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