A clinical trial has shown that patients, and their physicians, are eager to jump into next-era cancer care - analysis of an individual's tumor to find and target genetic mutations that drive the cancer. Results of the study, CUSTOM, are being presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology years before investigators thought they would be ready.

In a landmark cancer study published online in Nature, researchers at NYU School of Medicine have unraveled a longstanding mystery about how pancreatic tumor cells feed themselves, opening up new therapeutic possibilities for a notoriously lethal disease with few treatment options. Pancreatic cancer kills nearly 38,000 Americans annually, making it a leading cause of cancer death. The life expectancy for most people diagnosed with it is less than a year.

A new class of drug targeting skin cancer's genetic material has been successfully tested in humans for the first time, opening the way to new treatments for a range of conditions from skin cancers to eye diseases. The research involves the drug Dz13, a targeted molecular therapy, which was developed at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and has now been found to be safe in a clinical trial of patients with the common skin cancer, basal-cell carcinoma.

A study led by prominent breast cancer experts from Europe and the US has revealed a number of potentially important prospects for targeted therapies, and brings opportunities of truly personalised therapy for breast cancer a step closer, researchers said at the 5th IMPAKT Breast Cancer Conference in Brussels, Belgium.

There is worldwide concern in the biomedical research community that enrollment in clinical trials is lagging, putting clinical research and consequent benefits to society in jeopardy. Experts explore ways to embed patient voices and values in clinical research in the current issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Fueled in part by an inclination to speed new treatments to patients, research studies for cancer therapies tend to be smaller and less robust than for other diseases. This raises some questions about how cancer therapies will work in practice, according to researchers at Duke Medicine, who published an analysis of nearly 9,000 oncology clinical research studies online April 29, 2013, in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

In an advance toward coping with bacteria that shrug off existing antibiotics and sterilization methods, scientists are reporting development of a new family of selective antimicrobial agents that do not rely on traditional antibiotics. Their report on these synthetic colloid particles, which can be custom-designed to recognize the shape of specific kinds of bacteria and inactivate them, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.