Palliative Oncological Patients with Insomnia: Concerns of the Patients and Their Relatives' Perception.

Insomnia is one of the most frequent symptoms and usually generates significant stress in 60% of patients with advanced cancer. Worries from the patients' and relatives' perspective are crucial to improve the patients' quality of life but have received limited attention. The aims were to identify the concerns of patients with insomnia in the terminal illness stage in a palliative care unit and the relatives' perception, and to compare both.

Pevonedistat, a Nedd8-activating enzyme inhibitor, sensitizes neoplastic B-cells to death receptor-mediated apoptosis.

While death receptor ligands (Fas and TRAIL) kill chemoresistant tumor cell lines, related therapies have limited clinical efficacy as single agents. Death receptor signaling is modulated by nuclear factor-κB (NFκB), a family of transcription factors which are constitutively active in B-cell malignancies. We and others have shown that pevonedistat, an investigational inhibitor of the NEDD8-activating enzyme, abrogates NFκB activity in B-cell neoplasia.

Erythropoietin Stimulates Tumor Growth via EphB4.

While recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEpo) has been widely used to treat anemia in cancer patients, concerns about its adverse effects on patient survival have emerged. A lack of correlation between expression of the canonical EpoR and rhEpo's effects on cancer cells prompted us to consider the existence of an alternative Epo receptor. Here, we identified EphB4 as an Epo receptor that triggers downstream signaling via STAT3 and promotes rhEpo-induced tumor growth and progression.