Category Archives: Cancer

When faced with the most aggressive forms of lung cancer, how can the efficacy of chemotherapy be increased? Teams from Inserm, Université Paris Descartes and the Paris public hospitals system AP-HP have maybe hit on a solution. They have developed a targeted therapy which aims to improve the response to platinum salts – the standard chemotherapy used in lung cancer – by neutralizing the activity of a receptor that contributes to its aggressiveness. This research, published in Cancer Letters, shows that in mice this therapy restores the response to chemotherapy and reduces the risk of metastasis by one half to two thirds.

Liver cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer worldwide. While the majority of patients develop hepatocellular carcinoma, 10 to 20 % develop the second type of primary liver cancer: intrahepatic cholangiocellular carcinoma – a highly-invasive cancer of the liver bile ducts. And while both these tumor types have some risk factors in common, the number of patients presenting with intrahepatic cholangiocellular carcinoma has seen a marked increase in recent years. A team of researchers led by Prof. Lars Zender from University Hospital Tübingen (Germany), in conjunction with researchers from the National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, United States), Institut Pasteur, Inserm and CNRS, has recently demonstrated that the cell environment, with its dying liver cells, determines the path taken by the tumor cells. These findings were published in Nature on September 12, 2018.