– Some aggressive breast cancer tumors that disproportionately strike African-American women are known to take up blood sugar very rapidly.

Victor J. Dzau, MD , chancellor for health affairs at Duke University and chief executive officer of Duke University Health System, has been named the 2011 winner of the Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research

Tiny tumor proteins circulating in blood may be used to identify which pancreatic cancer patients would benefit from the drug Avastin, researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found. The findings, reported Monday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, could explain why bevacizumab (marketed by Roche as Avastin) did not provide clinical benefit for pancreatic cancer patients during clinical trials. Those studies showed it failed to extend lives when prescribed randomly compared to placebo

Routine mammograms performed for breast cancer screening could serve another purpose as well: detecting calcifications in the blood vessels of patients with advanced kidney disease, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology ( CJASN ). Mammograms show calcium deposits in the breast arteries in nearly two-thirds of women with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), according to the study by W. Charles O’Neill, MD (Emory University, Atlanta).

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that women are better than men at figuring out unusual products when they’re among competing items. “A lot of times when we look at how consumers respond to innovative change in a product’s physical form, we fail to consider that the context where they see the product plays a major role in how they evaluate and interpret it,” write authors Theodore J. Noseworthy, June Cotte, and Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee (all University of Western Ontario)

Researchers have identified how the hormones progesterone and estrogen interact to increase cell growth in normal mammary cells and mammary cancers, a novel finding that may explain why postmenopausal women receiving hormone replacement therapy with estrogen plus progestin are at increased risk of breast cancer.

Following review of interim data by the independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) for two large-scale, global phase three trials evaluating vorapaxar, an investigational anti-clotting medication, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) announced today they are following the recommendations of the DSMB to discontinue study drug in one study among a subset of patients and discontinue study drug in the other trial in which the protocol target number of endpoint events had been reached. Vorapaxar is a protease activated receptor-1 (PAR-1) inhibitor, which is a new class of anti-platelet heart medication that acts on a different pathway from standard therapy, including aspirin and drugs such as clopidogrel