Cancer News

Dr Subir Basak, Biocon's general manager for business development, said: "Head and neck cancer is not studied in the US, while the Indian sub-continent accounts for one-third of the head and neck cancer patients in the world. The PMS study report will be beneficial to the research of cancer the world over".

The trial results for this drug, touted as being the world's first humanised monoclonal antibody for cancer, have been published in Journal of Clinical Oncology of US in 2004.

A team at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine studied mice that had cells with one or more extra or missing chromosomes -- a characteristic known as aneuploidy, a common feature of cancer cells.

"We questioned whether the wrong number of chromosomes contributed to tumor growth or was a consequence of the accrued damage in cancerous cells," Don Cleveland, a professor of medicine at UCSD, explained in a prepared statement.

"We found that, with age, having cells which inherited the wrong composition of chromosomes resulted in a larger number of spontaneous tumors," Cleveland said.

Healthday comes with another incompetent article which is instantly being spread over other news websites.

What their article proposes is to absolutely minimize your exposure to the sunlight. This kind of advice is worth absolutely nothing. The American Cancer Society experts are forgetting the vitalizing and healing properties of the sunlight. However, abuse of everything good and useful will result in negative reaction. Laying on the beach for hours, visiting tanning salon every two days, etc - all this is too much.

The list of advices provided by Healthday should not be applied to everyone. People with sensitive skin, with sunlight allergy, with pigment spots, over certain age - they may benefit from such information. However, this info should be already known by them.

Anyways, off to read the Health Tip: Keep Deadly Skin Cancer Away on Yahoo News.

Dec. 27, 2006 -- A combination of breast cancer drugs -- Tykerb and Xeloda -- slows metastatic breast cancer after Herceptin finally fails.

However, the combination treatment did not extend patients' lives in an international clinical trial.

In the trial, Charles E. Geyer, MD, of Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, and colleagues studied 324 women with metastatic breast cancer, meaning their cancer had spread to other organs.

Nearly all had been treated with Herceptin for a median of 42-44 weeks.

Medical News Today - Compelling new data confirming the survival benefits of Herceptin(REG) (trastuzumab) in early and advanced HER2-positive breast cancer were presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS).

Efficacy in Early Breast Cancer

BCIRG 006

Updated results of the BCIRG 006 study[i] showed that adding Herceptin to either of two adjuvant chemotherapy regimens reduced the risk of death by 34 to 41% compared with chemotherapy alone. Furthermore, the addition of Herceptin significantly reduced the risk of cancer coming back by 33-39%. These remarkable data confirm the survival benefit provided by Herceptin to women with HER2-positive early breast cancer, as previously seen in three other large adjuvant Herceptin studies[ii], [iii].

Canadian and international researchers are recruiting men for a clinical trial to test whether combining a high-dose vitamin D pill with chemotherapy improves treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

Dr. Kim Chi of the B.C. Cancer Agency and two other lead investigators will study about 1,000 men over the next two years.

Currently, there is little to offer prostate cancer patients who have stopped responding to standard hormone therapy, Chi said.

BETHESDA, Md. An environmental group says Maryland's air has cancer-causing toxins at levels far above what the federal government deems safe.

The report was released by Environment Maryland as part of a push to make Maryland the eleventh state to follow California's stricter auto emissions standards.The group's report is based on an analysis of federal data released earlier this year.

It found that the risk of cancer from all air toxins was at least ten times higher than the federal standard in each of the state's 23 counties and Baltimore City. The report didn't include data on how Maryland's levels compare with the rest of the country.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times

When researchers reported recently that a precipitous drop in breast cancer rates might be explained by a corresponding decrease in the use of hormones for menopause, women reacted with shock, anger and, in some cases, profound relief that they had never taken the drugs.

But many also had questions. How certain were scientists that the hormones were responsible? How could stopping hormones have such an immediate and pronounced effect? And how much did scientists really know about the biology of breast cancer and hormones?

The data seemed clear enough. In 2003, after climbing for almost seven decades, the breast cancer rate fell for the first time in the United States, and it fell sharply. Over all, the incidence of newly diagnosed breast cancer dropped 7 percent, and it dropped 15 percent among women with cancers whose growth is fueled by estrogen.

A University of Liverpool team found a family of proteins involved in controlling cell movement could be key.

The study, which appears in the journal Gut, could offer a new lead on a disease which is hard to treat.

There are around 7,000 cases of pancreatic cancer in the UK each year. It can be hard to spot as the pancreas is located deep inside the body.

Korean scientists say they have developed a diagnostic technique to discover tiny cancer cells that existing magnetic resonance imaging devices cannot locate, paving the way for early diagnosis and thus more effective treatment. The team led by Cheon Jin-woo and Suh Jin-suck, a chemical and medical professor at Yonsei University, said Monday they developed a super-sensitive nano particle that helped them photograph a 2 mm cancer cell in an animal test.

The results were published in the latest online edition of Nature Medicine on Monday. The team created a nano particle that is one 100,000th the size of a hair, named MEIO, which they combined with an antibody that sticks only to cancerous cells and then injected it to mice with breast cancer and ovarian cancer before performing an MRI. Prof. Cheon said oxidized steel adhering to cancer cells responds to the magnetic field of the MRI and makes a unique sound as if a magnet draws metals.

BALTIMORE, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- Men with early prostate cancer who eat a vegetarian diet, exercise and reduce stress may lower their risk of cancer progression, says a U.S. study.

The 93 study participants were men with early-stage prostate cancer who had chosen "watchful waiting" instead of active treatment for their prostate cancer.

During the one-year study, six men in the usual care group underwent conventional treatment because of rising prostate specific antigen, known as PSA, or evidence of progression from magnetic resonance imaging. In contrast, none of the men in the comprehensive lifestyle group, who followed a very-low-fat diet of 10 percent or less of daily calories, needed treatment. PSA levels decreased 4 percent in the lifestyle group, whereas PSA levels increased 6 percent in the usual-care group.

The double-blind, placebo-controlled phase III clinical trial was conducted to test the efficacy of the vaccine, called sipuleucel-T, in delaying disease progression and prolonging survival in patients with asymptomatic metastatic hormone refractory prostate cancer (HRPC).

When given to ease pain and other complaints in patients with late-stage non-small cell lung cancer, a longer, less intense course of radiotherapy offers better value for the money than short-course intense treatment, concludes a study by Dutch researchers.

A previous study by the Leiden University Medical Center team compared a short course of two treatments of 8 gray (Gy) of radiation each, or a long course of 10 treatments of 3 Gy each. Patients who received the long course had more symptom improvement and improved one-year survival compared to patients who received the short course.

In this new study, the researchers analyzed the costs of the two treatment approaches to determine which one offered the best value for the money. They estimated the costs of treatment and related expenses, such as medical care for people who survived their cancer.

London, Britain (AHN) - A new study by the Cancer Research U.K. at University College London found that British teen are putting their health at risk by spending more hours watching TV and playing computer games and not doing physical excercise.

The study, involving nearly 6,000 11-12 year olds from several London schools, tracked teen's physical activity and sedentary behavior over a five-year period. The study found that physical activity declined in girls by 46 percent and in boys by 23 percent over five years.

Girls increased their sedentary behavior by 2.8 hours a week while in boys the increase was 2.5 hours a week. By age 16, girls were physically active on less than two days a week and boys for just over three days a week.

According to results presented at the 2006 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS), updated results continue to demonstrate better efficacy with dose-dense chemotherapy than with conventional chemotherapy in early breast cancer.

Dose-dense chemotherapy (chemotherapy with a shortened interval between doses), has demonstrated improvement in outcomes compared to conventional chemotherapy in patients with high-risk, early breast cancer. Due to concerns about side effects, however, studies continue to evaluate the long-term effects of dose-dense therapy.

To compare dose-dense chemotherapy to conventional chemotherapy in patients with high-risk early breast cancer, researchers in Germany conducted a Phase III clinical trial.

ISLAMABAD - People with a family history of pancreatic cancer should make an extra effort to stay off tobacco.

A new study suggests smoking could trigger this deadly form of cancer in people who are at high risk of developing the disease. Researchers from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, studied 826 people with pancreatic cancer, of whom 30 had at least one close relative who had also had the disease.

They found that people with a family history were more likely to develop the disease at a younger age -- below 50 -- and also more likely to be smokers. Smoking is known to raise the risk of pancreatic cancer, said study co-author John Gibbs, MD, FACS, a surgical oncologist and chief of the department of gastrointestinal surgery and endoscopy at Roswell Park.

"What was surprising is that when you have people with familial pancreatic cancer and they present at a younger age, [smoking] seems to be an added risk factor contributing to the malignant transformation," he explained.

BOSTON, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY.N) said on Thursday that it has stopped a trial of its experimental brain cancer drug after a monitoring committee determined the treatment would probably prove no more effective than chemotherapy in delaying progression of the disease.

Lilly said an interim analysis of data from a late-stage, or Phase III, study suggested the drug, enzastaurin, would not stave off an aggressive and recurrent form of brain cancer known as recurrent glioblastoma any better than chemotherapy.

The company said it will continue enrolling patients in a late-stage trial to evaluate enzastaurin as a potential treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It will also continue mid-stage trials of the drug in other cancers, such as breast, colon, lung, ovarian and prostate.

source - Reuters 

The research builds on earlier work that showed that an engineered version of the stem cell could home in on a brain tumor and deliver drugs directly to the target area. But this is the first time that research has shown that the same process might be used to attack cancer that has metastasized throughout the body.

So far the research has been limited to mice, but scientists are hopeful that clinical trials involving humans with advanced cancer can begin reasonably soon, possibly in less than a couple of years.

A key enzyme that cuts short our cellular lifespan in an effort to thwart cancer has now been linked to body mass.

Until now, scientists believed that our relatively long lifespans controlled the expression of telomerase—an enzyme that can lengthen the lives of cells, but can also increase the rate of cancer.

Scientists said on Wednesday they were developing new experimental drugs that block the blood supply to tumors in a novel way which could be effective for treating difficult types of cancer.

Unlike other drugs that starve tumors of blood by preventing the growth of blood vessels, or angiogenesis, the new treatment takes a different approach.

It increases the formation of blood vessels but they do not work well so the tumor cannot grow and survive.

"You seem to end up with more blood vessels but they are less functional," Dr Gavin Thurston, of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, New York, said in an interview.

Chris Knutson, ANP, MN

"Survivorship medicine" is becoming a more frequent challenge for practitioners of all specialties. Women cancer survivors who make their way back into "routine" care following cancer treatment have questions and concerns that could hardly be considered routine. Some will ultimately be cured. Some will deal with cancer's chronicity. All of them find their lives forever changed by cancer.

Michael Krychman, MD, Co-Director of the Sexual Medicine Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, recently spoke of the reproductive and sexual concerns of women with cancer. He reminds his patients that "you may survive this illness but your life will never, ever be the same." Helping patients come to grips with that concept and making accommodations to enhance or preserve sexual functioning and fertility are increasingly frequent and critical components of cancer care.

In several experiments reported in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Craig Logsdon, Ph.D., of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center here, and colleagues, found that:

• Cromolyn binds to S100P, a protein that is over-expressed in pancreatic cancer and is associated with tumor growth and invasion.
• S100P itself binds to the receptor for advanced glycation end-products (or RAGE) to initiate downstream signaling that leads to tumor growth. The researchers showed that cromolyn blocks that interaction in vitro.
• In mice with tumors that express S100P, the medication, in combination with the standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, Gemzar (gemcitabine), sharply reduced tumor growth.
• Finally, in tumors that do not express S100P, cromolyn had no effect.

Laura Bush's skin cancer came with a classic symptom, a slow-healing sore.

That made it hard to ignore, a good thing: Remove skin cancer early, and it's easy to cure.

Better is preventing skin cancer, and key is protecting yourself - and your children, starting when they're tots - from the sun. Sunburns early in life are considered the most dangerous.

Too few heed that advice. Skin cancer strikes over 1 million Americans annually, and is on the rise.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who use plenty of olive oil in their diets may be helping to prevent damage to body cells that can eventually lead to cancer, new research suggests.

In a study of 182 European men, researchers found evidence that olive oil can reduce oxidative damage to cells' genetic material, a process that can initiate cancer development.

They say the findings may help explain why rates of several cancers are higher in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe, where olive oil is a dietary staple.