Publications by authors named "Daniel C Ma"

Purpose: Patient experience tools are used throughout health care to evaluate physician and departmental performance. In radiation medicine, these tools are important in evaluating patient-specific metrics throughout their care journey. This study compared patient experience outcomes from a central tertiary cancer program with network clinics in a health care network.

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Ketogenic diets (KD) are high in fat and low in carbohydrates, forcing cells to utilize mitochondrial fatty acid oxidation for energy production. Since cancer cells demonstrate increased mitochondrial oxidative stress relative to normal cells, we hypothesized that a KD may selectively enhance metabolic oxidative stress in head and neck cancer cells, sensitizing them to radiation and platinum-based chemotherapy without causing increased toxicity in surrounding normal tissues. This hypothesis was tested in preclinical murine xenografts and in a phase 1 clinical trial (NCT01975766).

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Ketogenic diets are low in carbohydrates and high in fat, which forces cells to rely more heavily upon mitochondrial oxidation of fatty acids for energy. Relative to normal cells, cancer cells are believed to exist under a condition of chronic mitochondrial oxidative stress that is compensated for by increases in glucose metabolism to generate reducing equivalents. In this study we tested the hypothesis that a ketogenic diet concurrent with radiation and chemotherapy would be clinically tolerable in locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and pancreatic cancer and could potentially exploit cancer cell oxidative metabolism to improve therapeutic outcomes.

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Background: Host-derived lipids including cholesteryl esters (CEs) such as cholesteryl linoleate have emerged as important antibacterial effectors of innate immunity in the airways and cholesteryl linoleate has been found elevated in the context of inflammation. Cystic fibrosis (CF) patients suffer from chronic infection and severe inflammation in the airways. Here, we identified and quantified CEs in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) from CF patients and non-CF disease controls, and tested whether CE concentrations are linked to the disease.

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