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Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...

Excitement at new cancer treatment

White blood cells were taken from patients with leukaemia, modified in the lab and then put back.  But the data has not been published or reviewed and two patients are said to have died from an extreme immune response.  Experts said the trial was exciting, but still only "a baby step."  The news bubbled out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Washington DC.  The lead scientist, Prof Stanley Riddell from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said all other treatments had failed in these patients and they had only two-to-five months to live. He told the conference that: "The early data is unprecedented."In the trial, cells from the immune system called killer t-cells were taken out of dozens of patients. The cells normally act like bombs destroying infected tissue.  The researchers genetically modified the t-cells to engineer a new targeting mechanism - with the technical name of chimeric antigen...

Genetic clue to breast cancer relapses, which could lead to better treatment

A research team from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge found that cancers that return were more likely to contain certain genes or combinations of genes.  Targeting these genes with early treatments could be key, they said.  The study is being presented at the European Cancer Congress in Vienna.  In around one in five people with breast cancer, the disease will return - either to the same place as the original tumour or another part of the body.  Dr Lucy Yates, clinical research oncologist from the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, and her colleagues analysed data from the tumours of 1,000 breast cancer patients including 161 people whose cancer had recurred or spread. When comparing primary and secondary tumours, they found  noticeable genetic differences and several of the mutations present in the secondary cancers were relatively uncommon in cancers diagnosed for the first time.  Dr Yates said the patterns they found suggested that t...

Two new therapies of advanced kidney cancer could change treatment of the disease, say experts

Both drugs increased survival in trials which are also published in the New England Journal of Medicine.One drug takes the brakes off the immune system while the other stops growth signals in the tumour.  Cancer Research UK said the developments will "greatly expand the arsenal" of available drugs.  Kidney cancer is the eighth most common cancer in the UK and survival rates plummet if it is caught late.  Once the tumour has spread to other parts of the body then only one-in-10 people live for five years after diagnosis.  It's another big day for immunotherapy for cancerDr James Larkin, Royal Marsden Hospital The first trial, called Checkmate 025, used the immunotherapy drug  nivolumab.  It is one of a suite of "checkpoint inhibitors" being developed by pharmaceutical companies that stop cancers turning off the immune system.  They have already been proven effective in skin and lung cancers.  The trial on 821 patients showed average...