Tag Archives: BRCA

Recent immune checkpoint study failures do not dampen enthusiasm for the future

Immune checkpoint inhibitors are simply cancer wonder drugs about which we are learning more each day. Because they don’t work optimally in many patients and some even hyper-progress, the goal is to determine ways to expand their effectiveness to more patients. As such, the number of clinical studies with checkpoints and checkpoint combinations continues to grow.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors act by blocking the abrogating phase of the immune response that is necessary to prevent autoimmune disease – by prolonging the immune response against cancer, a more robust and prolonged immune response, which is required for effective cancer therapy, is achieved with checkpoint therapy. Continue reading

Epigenetic signature in blood for breast cancer risk

As reported in Genomic Medicine on June 27, an epigenetic signature in patients with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations was found by examining DNA methylation (DNAme) patterns on whole blood samples.  Importantly, this signature predicted for a high risk of developing breast cancer even in those patients who did NOT have BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. Continue reading