Oncotarget Special Collection: Lung CancerListen to an audio version of this post
Lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. According to the CDC, smoking cigarettes is linked to 80-90% of lung cancer deaths in the United States. In non-smokers, lung cancer can be caused by exposure to radon, secondhand smoke, air pollution, asbestos, diesel exhaust, and other chemicals and factors.
Some symptoms of lung cancer include pain in chest or ribs, frequent respiratory infections, shortness of breath, wheezing, fatigue or loss of appetite. As numerous research studies about lung cancer are currently underway, we hope this Special Collection will set future research in motion to discover more causes and treatments for this disease.
Special Collections: Lung Cancer
Oncotarget publishes open access peer-reviewed literature about research studies, clinical studies, reviews, case reports, and meta-analyses on a variety of different topics pertaining to cancer. Lung cancer continues to be an area of interest for researchers, therefore, the Special Collection on Lung Cancer was created by Oncotarget for scientists and researchers to discover new biomarkers, mechanisms, and therapies to treat this cancer.
All content submitted for publication has been reviewed by a diligent board of academic editors and world-renowned scientists and researchers. In this Special Collection, the content focussing on lung cancer is organized together in one place, including papers such as “Molecular pathways and therapeutic targets in lung cancer” by Emma Shtivelman, Thomas Hensing, George R. Simon, Phillip A. Dennis, Gregory A. Otterson, Raphael Bueno, and Ravi Salgia. This review is a summary of the pathways and mechanisms involved in current treatment methods for lung cancer of various types.
Oncotarget is a unique platform designed to house scientific studies in a journal format that is available for anyone to read—without a paywall making access more difficult. This means information that has the potential to benefit our societies from the inside out can be shared with friends, neighbors, colleagues and other researchers, far and wide.
As you may know, Oncotarget is a scientific journal that publishes oncology-focused review and research papers every week on its open access platform — available at no cost to readers. Recently, a new Special Collections series debuted, and the first collection launched in honor of breast cancer awareness.
What makes our collections special?
Oncotarget carefully selects the most credible and insightful studies to publish on Oncotarget.com, while also choosing papers that link different fields of oncology, cancer research, and biomedical sciences together to eliminate borders between specialties. The term “oncotarget” encompasses all molecules, pathways, cellular functions, cell types, and tissues that can be viewed as targets relevant to cancer, as well as other diseases. This journal is a resource for oncology researchers and the larger scientific community.
Before a study is published in Oncotarget, selected papers are meticulously peer-reviewed by an editorial board of award-winning scientific editors from academic universities and institutions well-known for their excellence and precision. Click here for a complete list of Oncotarget Editorial Board members.
Breast cancer research
Each year, over 40,000 women and men lose the fight against breast cancer in the United States. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women. The spread of breast cancer awareness and increase in research funding has helped develop advances and discoveries in the diagnosis and treatment of this proliferous cancer.
The new Special Collections by Oncotarget are yet another tool researchers and science readers alike may use as a resource to learn more about breast cancer. The creators of these collections also hope that they may be used by scientists to discover new biomarkers, mechanisms, and therapies to improve our quality of life and better treat cancer and diseases.
Click here to explore the Special Collection on breast cancer.
A recent breakthrough medical study has revealed that exercise has been proven to combat breast cancer. The paper, entitled “Anticancer effect of physical activity is mediated by modulation of extracellular microRNA in blood,” was recently published in a June 2020 issue of the free online open-access medical journal Oncotarget. It was authored by an international team of medical researchers, headed by Dr. Alessandra Pulliero of the University of Genoa in Italy, and included Doctors Ming You, Pradeep Chaluvally-Raghavan, Barbara Marengo, Cinzia Domenicotti, Barbara Banelli, Paolo Degan, Luigi Molfetta, Fabio Gianiorio, and Alberto Izzotti.
While previous
medical studies have shown that physical activity reduces the risk of cancer,
particularly breast cancer, it’s been a mystery up to now exactly how this
happens. Medical researchers have long suspected that this healing process is
triggered by microRNAs, cellular fragments of RNA (ribonucleic acid) also known
as miRNAs.
What’s RNA?
Like DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA is one of the building blocks of life. It
acts as a messenger transmitting instructions that control the synthesis of
proteins. MicroRNAs stop a particular protein from being produced by binding
to, and then destroying, the messenger RNA that would have produced this
protein.
It is known
that miRNAs are incredibly important when it comes to carcinogenesis (the
creation of cancer) and cancer outcomes. In addition, MiRNAs regulate the creation
of muscle tissueand muscle mass,
and it’s been learned that structured exercise controls the creation of miRNA,
especially in skeletal muscle.
The research
team endeavored to test how exercise in breast cancer patients changed the
production of miRNA in their bodies. To begin, 30 women from northern Italy
between 54 and 78 years old walked for 45 minutes on the treadmill under
identical conditions. Blood samples were taken from them both before and after
the exercise sessions.
THE RESULTS
A technique
known as microarray analysis revealed that structured exercise modified 14
different extracellular miRNAs related to cancer. Structured exercise caused
all these miRNAs to decrease, except for a miRNA called miR-206, which
increased. The researchers discovered that the most striking effects induced by
exercise were changes in two miRNAs involved in breast cancer progression.
When the
researchers investigated the biological effects of these two miRNAs on human
breast cancer cells, they conclusively learned that working together, the
changes in these two microRNAs activated by a physical exercise program
suppressed breast cancer cells. Since too many miRNAs are linked to triggering
inflammation and the creation of lymphocytes (white blood cells in the lymph
system, which can influence breast cancer), the researchers also believe that
structured exercise might reduce inflammation by modulating miRNA in the blood.
They also found
that structured exercise improved blood pressure and glucose levels (cancerous
tumors feed on glucose) among participants. The doctors discovered that these
improvements in blood pressure and glucose levels helped regulate the miRNAs
being studied, and in turn helped the miRNAs combat cancer.
This
international team of researchers is confident that by testing for the levels
of these miRNAs in patients’ blood, they’ve achieved a non-invasive way of
establishing biomarkers (a measurable sign of whether a disease is present or
how severe it is) to prevent breast cancer. This is potentially a significant
breakthrough in breast cancer prevention and treatment.
As a result of
this study, the medical community now knows that structured exercise fights
breast cancer, and it’s been given a non-invasive way to diagnose and battle breast
cancer—and possibly other forms of cancers as well.
ABOUT ONCOTARGET
This important study was able to be published, and noticed so quickly, because it was made available by Impact Journals’ free, open-access cancer research journal Oncotarget. Currently, over 20,000 Oncotarget papers are also searchable on PubMed, a widely used free search engine for life sciences and biomedical research.
Because Oncotargetis open-access, it is free for everyone in the world to read. Most medical journals charge authors for publishing their work, and then in turn charge readers to access what could be all-important, life-saving information. With its revolutionary publishing model, Impact Journals, through publications like Oncotarget, makes it easy for anyone with important medical discoveries to communicate them to the public in the fastest and most effective way possible—possibly saving, prolonging, and improving many people’s lives in the process.
With the goal
of a life without disease, Impact Journals allows scientists to share their
exceptional discoveries, offers services that enable rapid dissemination of
results, and presents vital findings from the many fields of biomedical
science. It shares scientific findings through a comprehensive publication
process entailing peer review, manuscript preparation, and publication
promotion.
In addition, Oncotarget is well-known for publishing papers by Nobel Prize winners. The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Oncotarget Editorial Board members William G. Kaelin Jr., and Gregg L. Semenza for their discoveries of “how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability,” which can help us understand and potentially treat a range of conditions like cancer, heart attack, stroke, and anemia. (They shared the Prize with UK physician-scientist Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe.) Both William G. Kaelin and Gregg L. Semenza are founding members of Oncotarget, where Gregg L. Semenza has published eight papers.
Another notable Oncotarget Nobel Prize winner is endocrinologist Andrew V. Schally, a member of Oncotarget’s Editorial Board who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977 and who has published 12 papers in Oncotarget. Of Oncotarget’s work, he remarked: “Oncotarget is an outstanding and most important journal in the field of oncology and cancer research. Oncotarget is performing an extremely useful function for those of us working not only in cancer research, but also on other important topics in the field of medicine. Oncotarget deserves strong support from investigators working in the area of oncology as well as from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”
If you would like to be first to learn about some of the most exciting new discoveries in medical science, consider investigating the groundbreaking work being published by Impact Journals, including its flagship publication, Oncotarget.
