© 2005 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
In Brief
Crawford to be Nominated as FDA Commissioner
President Bush has announced that he will nominate Lester M. Crawford, D.V.M., Ph.D., to be commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Crawford has been acting commissioner since March 2004, when the previous director, Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., was confirmed as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Study Elucidates Function of BRCA2 Protein
Mutations in the BRCA2 tumor suppressor gene are known to confer an increased risk of breast and other cancers, but the function of the normal BRCA2 protein has been uncertain. A new study of a similar protein from a fungus has found that the BRCA2 protein may play an important role in repairing double-strand breaks in DNA. In humans, if these breaks are not repaired correctly, they can result in rearrangements in chromosomes that lead to cancer.
In the February 10 issue of Nature, Haijuan Yang, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and colleagues studied the function of a protein called Brh2, a homologue of BRCA2 from the fungus Ustilago maydis. BRCA2-like genes are found not only in mammals but also in plants and fungi.
The researchers found that Brh2 promotes the attachment of a protein called Rad51 onto broken DNA. Once Rad51 has attached itself to the broken DNA, the repair process can continue. The authors suggest that BRCA2 acts in a similar way in humans and that this explains why BRCA2-associated cancers have lost the ability to repair double-strand breaks in DNA.
Genetic Signature Could Identify Breast Cancer Patients at Risk of Recurrence
A new study has found that a 76-gene signature may be able to predict which breast cancer patients are most likely to experience a distant recurrence.
In the February 19 issue of The Lancet, John A. Foekens, Ph.D., of Erasmus MC Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues analyzed the gene expression in tumor samples from 286 lymph node–negative breast cancer patients. From a training set of 115 tumor samples, they identified a 76-gene signature that could predict disease relapse. When the signature was tested on a second set of 171 tumor samples, the signature could predict which patients would develop a distant recurrence with 93% sensitivity (proportion of true-positive results) and 48% specificity (proportion of true-negative results).
In addition, the researchers found that the 76-gene signature would indicate chemotherapy for only 52% of low-risk patients, compared with 90% using the St. Gallen guidelines and 89% using the National Institutes of Health guidelines. They conclude that their signature could reduce the number of low-risk lymph node–negative patients who would be recommended for adjuvant systemic therapy.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||