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April 29, 2013

ULM pharmacy professor invited to speak at conference in Malaysia

Dr. Paul Sylvester, Pfizer Endowed Professor of Pharmacology and Director of Graduate Studies and Research, has been invited to speak at the upcoming Dietary Palm Oil in Human Nutrition Conference – NUTRICON 2013.

In May, he will attend the conference in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

His paper "Combined gamma-Tocotrienol and Met-Inhibitor Treatment Suppresses Cancer Cell Proliferation, Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition, and Migration" shows, Sylvester said, "that tocotrienol treatment significantly inhibits the growth of breast cancer... These findings provide strong indications that tocotrienol therapy may provide some significant benefit in the treatment of highly invasive and metastatic forms of breast cancer."

NUTRICON will be part of Palm Oil Nutrition Week, the premier conference for research and innovations in palm oil ingredients and technology.

Sylvester said, "I made the initial discovery that diets containing high levels of palm oil significantly inhibited mammary cancer development growth in rats, and these findings were published in the very prominent journal, 'Cancer Research.' …Malaysia is the world's largest producer of palm oil, and thus the Malaysian Palm Oil Council has been very interested in our research."

Though this will be Sylvester's eighth trip to Malaysia, he looks forward to meeting and interacting with other scientists in his field, considering it a great opportunity to collaborate with other investigators from around the world.

"It is a great honor to be invited to this international conference," said Sylvester, "and to be given the opportunity to share our research with other investigators working in this same area of cancer research."

Sylvester has garnered both national and international attention for his breast cancer research.

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