Month: August 2015

Although targeted therapies have enhanced the efficiency of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) treatment, individual responses are usually limited with few complete remissions reported. An expanding therapy field in RCC is immunotherapy – small molecule and autologous treatments that can modulate the immune system to kill cancer cells. Although to date immunotherapies have only induced a … Read more

Folliculin interaction protein 1 (FNIP1), through interactions with FLCN, plays a role in a range of cellular processes (Baba et al., 2006). Alternative splicing of FNIP1, under the control of MBNL1, was previously reported in late mesenchymal differentiation (Venables et al., 2013). New research from De Conti et al., (2015) has identified FNIP1 as also … Read more

It is expected that genetic sequencing will advance both specialised and general healthcare leading to more personalised care based on an individual’s genome. It can be used to identify disease-specific mutations and those associated with more complex conditions. However, as discussed previously on this blog, understanding the effect of a single mutation can be difficult … Read more

Synthetic lethal compounds selectively kill cancer cells by targeting tumour cell-essential processes, but leave healthy cells unharmed. Research is ongoing to identify such compounds in a range of cancers (reviewed in McLornan et al., 2014) including renal cell carcinoma (RCC). New research from Wolff et al., (2015) has identified homoharringtonine (HHT) as synthetically lethal for … Read more