An extract of green tea appears to have clinical activity with low toxicity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients who used it in a phase II clinical trial, say researchers at Mayo Clinic. The findings were presented June 7 during the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). They are the latest [...]

A nationwide study has confirmed the benefit of giving estrogen-lowering drugs before surgery to breast cancer patients. The treatment increased the likelihood that women could undergo breast-conservation surgery, also called lumpectomy, instead of mastectomy. The study’s chair, Matthew J. Ellis, MD, PhD, the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Chair in Medical Oncology and a breast cancer specialist with [...]

Vaccinia immunization, as given to prevent the spread of smallpox, produces a five-fold reduction in HIV replication in the laboratory. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Immunology suggest that the end of smallpox vaccination in the mid-20th century may have caused a loss of protection that contributed to the rapid contemporary spread of HIV. [...]

Two teams of researchers — including Los Alamos National Laboratory theoretical biologists Bette Korber, Will Fischer, Sydeaka Watson, and James Szinger — have announced an HIV vaccination strategy that has been shown to expand the breadth and depth of immune responses in rhesus monkeys. Rhesus monkeys provide the best animal model currently available for testing [...]

A team of researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), writing in the science journal PLos ONE, have developed a biologic method to tease out which compounds from herbal medicines and medicinal herbal mixtures produce their reputed medicinal benefits. “This provides the first step to find, from all of the hundreds of compounds in herbs, [...]