Prof. Michal Neeman spoke at the 2014 Global Gathering session, Partners in Scientific Advancement, about why it's so important for us to get high-resolution images of cancer. Today's instrumentation allows scientists to actually observe cancer in the body, providing invaluable new data. Of course, staying on top of the technology, much less knowing how to maximize its use, is also a challenge.
October 29, 2014
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, one of today's most engaging science communicators and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ""The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,"" managed to compress the whole history of cancer studies, from primitive to sophisticated, as well a look to the future, into a few comprehensible, enjoyable minutes.
Time reports on the recent finding by Weizmann scientists that our bodies fight cancer better during the day, meaning that nighttime might be much better for administering cancer drugs. This “happy accident” is an example of how basic research can shed light on important issues.
October 09, 2014
Work, school, errands, commutes … it makes sense that we are more stressed during the day than when we're sleeping. And we do, in fact, produce more glucocorticoid (GC) – aka the stress hormone – during our waking hours. Now Weizmann scientists have found that GC also helps suppress cancer growth, meaning that perhaps we should be administering cancer drugs at night, while our bodies aren't fighting the cancer themselves.
October 06, 2014
Writing in The New Yorker, Dr. Jerome Groopman examines whether controlling cancer is a more viable option than trying to destroy it. A new treatment for the often-fatal acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) aims to do just that by forcing immature cells to grow up, rather than turn into leukemia cells – a breakthrough that builds on the work of Weizmann's Prof. Leo Sachs.
September 15, 2014
Leukemia cells are able to stay alive, aggressively dividing, virtually forever… but how? New Weizmann research suggests that about 25 percent of the time, there is a “balance of terror” between the cancer-promoting gene and a second, normal version. This normal gene functions alongside the mutation, keeping the cells both cancerous and alive.
September 29, 2013
Mickey Kertesz, who received his doctorate in computational biology from the Weizmann Institute's Feinberg Graduate School, has co-founded a startup that has streamlined DNA-sequencing techniques. He believes the technology will change the battlefield on which scientists fight diseases such as cancer, AIDS, and depression.
July 13, 2013
Triple negative breast cancer targets young black or Hispanic women and those of Jewish Ashkenazi descent, and standard therapies don't work for long. In a novel approach, Weizmann scientists engineered a two-front attack by binding different antibodies to different parts of growth receptors. A vaccination against cancer is their ultimate goal.
May 27, 2013
A decades-old “audacious idea” by Weizmann's Prof. Zelig Eshhar helped create a cancer treatment that has now led to full remissions in almost 20 adult and pediatric blood-cancer patients. Considered the future of cancer research by many, the therapy programs the patient's own immune cells to recognize and attack cancer.
May 20, 2013