Category Archives: DNA

FRIDAY, April 4, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- A new DNA test can identify prostate cancer patients at high risk for a return of their cancer, researchers say.

The test uses DNA from biopsy (tissue) samples taken before patients undergo surgery or radiation therapy for their cancer. The test is about 80 percent accurate in predicting which men have a high or low risk of their cancer returning within two years, according to the study.

The findings are scheduled for presentation Saturday at a meeting of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology in Vienna.

Surgery and targeted radiation therapy are the main treatments for cancer that's confined to the prostate. However, cancer returns in 30 percent to 50 percent of patients because its spread outside the prostate was undetected during the initial treatment, said study author Robert Bristow. He is a clinician-scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto and a professor at the University of Toronto.

"Men who fail treatment within two years may be at the highest risk of dying from their prostate cancer," he said in a society news release.

"Existing methods for identifying high-risk patients are imperfect, so new tests are required that are better at predicting which patients will have their cancer recur," Bristow said. "These men can then be offered additional treatments, such as chemo- and hormone therapy, that will combat the prostate cancer throughout their entire body, rather than therapies solely focused on the prostate, in order to improve their chances of survival."

The test was assessed in 276 prostate cancer patients with an intermediate risk of cancer recurrence. It needs to be validated over the next few years in different and larger groups, the researchers said.

"If all goes well, then this will lead to a new test for cancer patients that can be turned around in three days and will tell doctors which patients will do well with local treatment alone -- surgery or radiotherapy -- and which will need extra treatment," Bristow said.

Data and conclusions presented at meetings are typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

-- Robert Preidt

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DNA Test May Gauge Risk of Prostate Cancer's Return

James P. Eaton, of Palatine, Ill., right, was arrested Saturday in Chicago. He was being held in Racine County Jail on $1 million bail on charges of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse in connection to the 1997 death of Amber Creek, a 14-year-old from Palatine, Ill. (Courtesy: Racine County Sheriff)

RACINE, Wis. Authorities in Wisconsin and Oklahoma used DNA and fingerprint analysis to connect an Illinois man to the cold-case slaying of a teenage runaway whose battered body was found in a Wisconsin marsh in 1997, the Racine County sheriff said Tuesday.

James P. Eaton of Palatine, Ill., was arrested Saturday in Chicago. He was being held in Racine County Jail on $1 million bail on charges of first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse, Sheriff Chris Schmaling said. No court date was scheduled for Tuesday. Schmaling didn't know whether Eaton has an attorney.

"This is a day that we have been waiting more than 17 years to arrive," Schmaling said at a news conference.

Eaton is suspected in connection with the slaying of Amber Creek, a 14-year-old from Palatine, Ill. She had run away from a state-operated juvenile shelter in Chicago on Jan. 23, 1997. She then attended a party at a motel in Rolling Meadows, Ill., the week of her death. She was last seen leaving the party and getting into a luxury car that had a placard reading "mayor," and was driven by a man described as being white and in his 30s.

Two weeks later, a pair of hunters found Creek's corpse in a marsh in the Town of Burlington. She'd been beaten, sexually assaulted and suffocated with a plastic bag.

Her body was left posed with an upraised hand that had the word "Hi" written on her palm. Investigators referred to her as Jane Doe for 16 months until they could determine her name.

Schmaling said there was no indication that Eaton, who would have been 19 at the time of her disappearance, and Creek knew each other.

"Eaton had not previously been a suspect or mentioned during the course of this investigation," he said.

Investigators recovered DNA from Creek's body and fingerprints from the bag used to suffocate her. The evidence was sent to the FBI and crime labs in every other state, but there were no matches.

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DNA ties man to 1997 murder of teen runaway

Authorities tailed a man for several days and used DNA from a cigarette he tossed away at a train station to connect him to the cold-case slaying of a teenage runaway whose body was found in a marsh in 1997, a sheriff in southeastern Wisconsin said Tuesday.

James P. Eaton, 36, of Palatine, Ill., was arrested Saturday in Chicago after investigators conducting the surveillance were able to recover the partially used cigarette, Racine County Sheriff Chris Schmaling said.

Eaton has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse. He was being held in Racine County Jail on Tuesday on $1 million bail, and Schmaling didn't know whether Eaton has an attorney. No court date was scheduled for Tuesday,

"This is a day that we have been waiting more than 17 years to arrive," Schmaling said at a news conference.

Eaton is suspected in connection with the slaying of Amber Creek, a 14-year-old from Palatine, Ill. She had run away from a state-operated juvenile shelter in Chicago on Jan. 23, 1997. She was last seen leaving a motel party in Rolling Meadows, Ill., and getting into a luxury car that had a placard reading "mayor." The driver was described as a white man in his 30s.

Two weeks later, a pair of hunters found Creek's corpse in a marsh in the Town of Burlington. She'd been beaten, sexually assaulted and suffocated with a plastic bag, and she had a human bite mark on her neck. Her body was left posed with an upraised hand that had the word "Hi" written on her palm. Investigators referred to her as Jane Doe for 16 months until they could determine her name.

Schmaling said there was no indication that Eaton, who would have been 19 at the time of her disappearance, and Creek knew each other.

"Eaton had not previously been a suspect or mentioned during the course of this investigation," he said.

Investigators recovered DNA from Creek's body and fingerprints from the bag used to suffocate her. The evidence was sent to the FBI and crime labs in every other state, but there were no matches.

Then on Feb. 28, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation informed the Wisconsin Department of Justice that the fingerprint evidence matched the prints of Eaton, who'd been convicted in Illinois in 2000 for possessing drug paraphernalia.

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Wisconsin Sheriff: DNA Ties Man to 1997 Slaying

UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have demonstrated in both cancer cell lines and in mice that blocking critical DNA repair mechanisms could improve the effectiveness of radiation therapy for highly fatal brain tumors called glioblastomas.

Radiation therapy causes double-strand breaks in DNA that must be repaired for tumors to keep growing. Scientists have long theorized that if they could find a way to block repairs from being made, they could prevent tumors from growing or at least slow down the growth, thereby extending patients' survival. Blocking DNA repair is a particularly attractive strategy for treating glioblastomas, as these tumors are highly resistant to radiation therapy. In a study, UT Southwestern researchers demonstrated that the theory actually works in the context of glioblastomas.

"This work is informative because the findings show that blocking the repair of DNA double-strand breaks could be a viable option for improving radiation therapy of glioblastomas," said Dr. Sandeep Burma, Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology in the division of Molecular Radiation Biology at UT Southwestern.

His lab works on understanding basic mechanisms by which DNA breaks are repaired, with the translational objective of improving cancer therapy with DNA damaging agents. Recent research from his lab has demonstrated how a cell makes the choice between two major pathways that are used to repair DNA breaks -- non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) and homologous recombination (HR). His lab found that enzymes involved in cell division called cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) activate HR by phosphorylating a key protein, EXO1. In this manner, the use of HR is coupled to the cell division cycle, and this has important implications for cancer therapeutics. These findings were published April 7 in Nature Communications.

While the above basic study describes how the cell chooses between NHEJ and HR, a translational study from the Burma lab demonstrates how blocking both repair pathways can improve radiotherapy of glioblastomas. Researchers in the lab first were able to show in glioblastoma cell lines that a drug called NVP-BEZ235, which is in clinical trials for other solid tumors, can also inhibit two key DNA repair enzymes, DNA-PKcs and ATM, which are crucial for NHEJ and HR, respectively. While the drug alone had limited effect, when combined with radiation therapy, the tumor cells could not quickly repair their DNA, stalling their growth.

While excited by the initial findings in cell lines, researchers remained cautious because previous efforts to identify DNA repair inhibitors had not succeded when used in living models -- mice with glioblastomas. Drugs developed to treat brain tumors also must cross what's known as the blood-brain-barrier in living models.

But the NVP-BEZ235 drug could successfully cross the blood-brain-barrier, and when administered to mice with glioblastomas and combined with radiation, the tumor growth in mice was slowed and the mice survived far longer -- up to 60 days compared to approximately 10 days with the drug or radiation therapy alone. These findings were published in the March 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

"The consequence is striking," said Dr. Burma. "If you irradiate the tumors, nothing much happens because they grow right through radiation. Give the drug alone, and again, nothing much happens. But when you give the two together, tumor growth is delayed significantly. The drug has a very striking synergistic effect when given with radiation."

The combination effect is important because the standard therapy for glioblastomas in humans is radiation therapy, so finding a drug that improves the effectiveness of radiation therapy could have profound clinical importance eventually. For example, such drugs may permit lower doses of X-rays and gamma rays to be used for traditional therapies, thereby causing fewer side effects.

"Radiation is still the mainstay of therapy, so we have to have something that will work with the mainstay of therapy," Dr. Burma said.

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Blocking DNA repair mechanisms could improve radiation therapy for deadly brain cancer

Johns Hopkins researchers say they have confirmed suspicions that DNA modifications found in the blood of mice exposed to high levels of stress hormone -- and showing signs of anxiety -- are directly related to changes found in their brain tissues.

The proof-of-concept study, reported online ahead of print in the June issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology, offers what the research team calls the first evidence that epigenetic changes that alter the way genes function without changing their underlying DNA sequence -- and are detectable in blood -- mirror alterations in brain tissue linked to underlying psychiatric diseases.

The new study reports only on so-called epigenetic changes to a single stress response gene called FKBP5, which has been implicated in depression, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. But the researchers say they have discovered the same blood and brain matches in dozens more genes, which regulate many important processes in the brain.

"Many human studies rely on the assumption that disease-relevant epigenetic changes that occur in the brain -- which is largely inaccessible and difficult to test -- also occur in the blood, which is easily accessible," says study leader Richard S. Lee, Ph.D., an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "This research on mice suggests that the blood can legitimately tell us what is going on in the brain, which is something we were just assuming before, and could lead us to better detection and treatment of mental disorders and for a more empirical way to test whether medications are working."

For the study, the Johns Hopkins team worked with mice with a rodent version of Cushing's disease, which is marked by the overproduction and release of cortisol, the primary stress hormone also called glucocorticoid. For four weeks, the mice were given different doses of stress hormones in their drinking water to assess epigenetic changes to FKBP5. The researchers took blood samples weekly to measure the changes and then dissected the brains at the end of the month to study what changes were occurring in the hippocampus as a result of glucocorticoid exposure. The hippocampus, in both mice and humans, is vital to memory formation, information storage and organizational abilities.

The measurements showed that the more stress hormones the mice got, the greater the epigenetic changes in the blood and brain tissue, although the scientists say the brain changes occurred in a different part of the gene than expected. This was what made finding the blood-brain connection very challenging, Lee says.

Also, the more stress hormone, the more RNA from the FKBP5 gene was expressed in the blood and brain, and the greater the association with depression. However, it was the underlying epigenetic changes that proved to be more robust. This is important, because while RNA levels may return to normal after stress hormone levels decrease or change due to small fluctuations in hormone levels, epigenetic changes persist, reflect overall stress hormone exposure and predict how much RNA will be made when stress hormone levels increase.

The team of researchers used an epigenetic assay previously developed in their laboratory that requires just one drop of blood to accurately assess overall exposure to stress hormone over 30 days. Elevated levels of stress hormone exposure are considered a risk factor for mental illness in humans and other mammals.

Other Johns Hopkins researchers involved in the study include Erin R. Ewald; Gary S. Wand, M.D.; Fayaz Seifuddin, M.S.; Xiaoju Yang, M.D.; Kellie L. Tamashiro, Ph.D.; and Peter Zandi, Ph.D. James B. Potash, M.D., M.P.H., formerly of Johns Hopkins, also contributed to this research.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (UO1 AA020890) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD055030), the Kenneth A. Lattman Foundation, a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant, the Margaret Ann Price Investigator Fund and the James Wah Fund for Mood Disorders via the Charles T. Bauer Foundation.

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DNA modifications measured in blood signal related changes in the brain

James P. Eaton (AP Photo/Racine County Sheriff)

Authorities tailed a man for several days and used DNA from a cigarette he tossed away at a train station to connect him to the cold-case slaying of a teenage runaway whose body was found in a marsh in 1997, a sheriff in southeastern Wisconsin said Tuesday.

James Eaton, 36, of Palatine, Ill., was arrested Saturday in Chicago, Racine County Sheriff Chris Schmaling said. Eaton has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse. He was being held at the Racine County Jail on Tuesday on $1 million bail.

"This is a day that we have been waiting more than 17 years to arrive," Schmaling said at a news conference.

Eaton is suspected in connection with the slaying of Amber Creek, a 14-year-old from Palatine, Ill.

Amber Gail Creek on her 13th birthday. (AP Photo/Racine County Sheriff via the Racine Journal Times)

Two weeks later, a pair of hunters found Creek's corpse in a marsh in the Town of Burlington. She'd been beaten, sexually assaulted and suffocated with a plastic bag. She had a human bite mark on her neck, and her body was posed with an upraised hand that had the word "Hi" written on her palm.

Investigators referred to her as Jane Doe for 16 months until they could determine her name.

Schmaling said there was no indication that Eaton, who would have been 19 at the time of her disappearance, knew Creek. "Eaton had not previously been a suspect or mentioned during the course of this investigation," he said.

Investigators recovered DNA from Creek's body and fingerprints from the bag used to suffocate her. The evidence was sent to the FBI and crime labs in other states, but no matches turned up.

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DNA ties Illinois man to Wisconsin runaway found dead in 1997

A cascade of DNA-binding proteins for sexual commitment and development in Plasmodium
Find out more: http://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/iii/staff/andywaters/index.html?refer=guyoutube http://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/iii/wtcmp/inde...

By: University of Glasgow

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A cascade of DNA-binding proteins for sexual commitment and development in Plasmodium - Video

Gorilla Warfare -The Crown Highlights/Recap DNA x Young Kannon
Exclusive behind the scenes footage w/ Adot from Game Ova Ent Filmed by Willie 2 Cold Edited By Adot gameovaent25@gmail.com Special thanks to Ms. Gracie Song...

By: Adotmaze25

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Gorilla Warfare -The Crown Highlights/Recap DNA x Young Kannon - Video

Ravno Do Dna II - Azra tribute band - Pit ... i to je Amerika
Ravno Do Dna II - Azra tribute band - nastup u klubu Fest, Zemun, 4. 4. 2014. video: Zoran Stojkovi.

By: ktd011

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Ravno Do Dna II - Azra tribute band - Pit ... i to je Amerika - Video

DNA scissors and recombinant DNA
This week in class we completed the paper DNA scissors and recombinant DNA activities. In this weeks discussion with Dr. Gary Baisa, he will be showing us ho...

By: Rick Baisa

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DNA scissors and recombinant DNA - Video