The combination of two different chemotherapies and a previously approved therapy for kidney and liver cancers is not effective against advanced melanoma, as per results disclosed in an oral presentation today at the 46th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago.
"With each newly released study, we learn something important about the therapy of melanoma," said John M. Kirkwood, M.D., professor of medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and leader of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's (UPCI) melanoma and skin cancer program. "With this study, we learned that the addition of sorafenib, a molecular inhibitor, to a traditional chemotherapy regimen does not improve patient survival".
The phase III trial, which was sponsored by the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG), enrolled 823 patients from seven different sites across the country over 34 months. The primary goal of the study was to determine whether the addition of sorafenib, a molecular targeting agent, would improve survival rates for patients with metastatic melanoma when added to the chemotherapy combination of carboplatin and paclitaxel. Patients either received the chemotherapy combination alone or with sorafenib.
"While this study didn't confirm the very promising results of phase II studies with sorafenib, it is important to share its findings since the double chemotherapy combination of carboplatin and paclitaxel has achieved results that eclipse prior chemotherapy results in large phase III trials. These results take us one step closer to understanding how to most effectively treat metastatic melanoma," said Dr. Kirkwood.........
Breast and patients with prostate cancer who regularly exercise during and after cancer therapy report having a better quality of life and being less fatigued, as per scientists at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
"Using exercise as an approach to cancer care has the potential to benefit patients both physically and psychologically, as well as mitigate therapy side effects," says study main author Eleanor M. Walker, M.D., division director of breast services in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Henry Ford Hospital.
"Plus, exercise is a great alternative to patients combating fatigue and nausea who are considering using supplements which may interfere with medications and chemotherapy they're taking during cancer therapy."
Dr. Walker will present a poster with the study's design and intervention methods June 7 at the 2010 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago. The abstract is now available online at www.ASCO.org.
To study how exercise impacts cancer patients, Dr. Walker and her colleagues at Henry Ford's Josephine Ford Cancer Center and the Henry Ford Heart & Vascular Institute developed a unique program called ExCITE (Exercise and Cancer Integrative Therapies and Education).
ExCITE works with patients who are receiving cancer therapy to create individualized exercise programs. Some patients come into one of Henry Ford's fitness centers to workout, while others have plans that allow them to exercise at home during various stages of their care.........
Mice bearing the mutation that causes familial adenomatous polyposis in human beings (Min mice) develop small intestinal tumors that express COX-2. Fluorocoxib injection into Min mice lights up an intestinal polyp.
Credit: Lawrence Marnett, Ph.D., and colleagues
A series of novel imaging agents could light up tumors as they begin to form before they turn deadly and signal their transition to aggressive cancers.
The compounds fluorescent inhibitors of the enzyme cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) could have broad applications for detecting tumors earlier, monitoring a tumor's transition from pre-malignancy to more aggressive growth, and defining tumor margins during surgical removal.
"We're very excited about these new agents and are moving forward to develop them for human clinical trials," said Lawrence Marnett, Ph.D., the leader of the Vanderbilt University team that developed the compounds, which are described in the May 1 issue of Cancer Research.
COX-2 is an attractive target for molecular imaging. It's not found in most normal tissues, and then it is "turned on" in inflammatory lesions and tumors, Marnett explained.
"COX-2 is expressed at the earliest stages of pre-malignancy in pre-cancerous lesions, but not in surrounding normal tissue and as a tumor grows and becomes increasingly cancerous, COX-2 levels go up," Marnett said.
Compounds that bind selectively to COX-2 and carry a fluorescent marker should act as "beacons" for tumor cells and for inflammation.
Marnett and colleagues previously demonstrated that fluorescent COX-2 inhibitors which they have now dubbed "fluorocoxibs" were useful probes for protein binding, but their early molecules were not appropriate for cellular or in vivo imaging.........
It is an accepted fact that genetics play a key role in a person's susceptibility to cancer, and that throughout life, mutations can cause damage to tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) further increasing the chances of developing malignant tumors.
Now a newly released study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) demonstrates that even subtle changes in expression of the PTEN tumor suppressor gene can significantly increase cancer susceptibility in specific tissues, suggesting that environmental factors, such as diet or exposure to carcinogens, may have a more dramatic influence on tumor development than previously recognized. Appearing in this week's Advance On-line issue of Nature Genetics, the findings propose a new model for the role of tumor suppressor genes in the onset of cancer and could prove valuable in the development of diagnostic tests targeted to these gene alterations.
"More than 30 years ago, it was proposed that a person's susceptibility to cancer was dependent on a 'two-hit' model," explains Pier Paolo Pandolfi, MD, PhD, Director of the Cancer Genetics Program at BIDMC and George C. Reisman Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. This meant that there had to be two genetic alterations of a single tumor suppressor gene (TSG) to activate tumor development one gene would be missing from birth, while the second would be lost to other factors during one's lifetime.........
Jay Groves (foreground) and Pradeep Nair used TIRF imaging and their own spatial mutation strategy to discover a new way in which cells can sense and respond to physical forces. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)
Conventional biological wisdom holds that living cells interact with their environment through an elaborate network of chemical signals. As a result a number of therapies for the therapy of cancer and other diseases in which cell behavior goes awry focus on drugs that block or disrupt harmful chemical signals. Now, a new road for future therapies may have been opened with scientific evidence for a never seen before way in which cells can also sense and respond to physical forces.
A team of scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley has shown that the biochemical activity of a cellular protein system, which plays a key role in cancer metastasis, can be altered by the application of a direct physical force. This discovery sheds important new light on how the protein signaling complex known as EphA2/ephrin-A1 contributes to the initiation, growth and progression of malignant cells, and also suggests how the activity of cancer cells can be affected by surrounding tissue.........
Cancer in the other breast in women with breast cancer
Postmenopausal women, including those over 70 years old, who have been newly diagnosed with cancer in one breast have higher cancer detection rates when the other breast is scanned for tumors with MRI, in comparison to premenopausal women, say scientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Florida.
They observed that 3.8 percent of 425 women had breast cancer in the undiagnosed breast that had not been found with a clinical or mammographic examination; all were postmenopausal. In these women, detecting and treating cancer in both breasts at the same time may save costs, patient stress, and the potential toxicity that may come from having to treat cancer later in the second breast once it is discovered, the scientists say in the March/recent issue of The Breast Journal.
Of particular interest to the scientists is their finding that patients 70 and older had a higher prevalence of cancer detected in the second breast by MRI than did younger patients in the study. MRI detected a cancer in the second breast in 5.4 percent of 129 elderly women included in the study.
"Our findings are not really surprising because we know that the risk of breast cancer increases as age increases," says the study's lead investigator, Johnny Ray Bernard Jr., M.D., a Radiation Oncologist at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. "Elderly women in good health potentially benefit from earlier detection, and we think that screening of the undiagnosed breast with MRI should be considered in all postmenopausal women diagnosed with a breast cancer."........
A mutation in a single gene can cause endometrial cancer that is responsive to a specific drug treatment, scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found in an animal study.
The finding suggests that eventually it might be possible to screen women with endometrial cancer to see if they have that mutation and use the drug as targeted treatment, the scientists said.
"Our data suggest that deficiency of this gene can indicate both how aggressive an endometrial tumor will be and how well it might respond to a specific class of drugs," said Dr. Diego Castrillon, assistant professor of pathology at UT Southwestern and senior author of the paper, which appears in the March/recent issue of Disease Models and Mechanisms
"Some early clinical trials have shown that about one-fifth of women with endometrial cancers respond to a group of drugs called 'rapalogs,'" Dr. Castrillon said. "Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to predict which women these are".
Endometrial cancer affects the lining of the uterus. This cancer is the most common cancer of the female reproductive tract and is commonly detected when a woman complains of excessive bleeding. About one-third of ovary cancer cases are believed to begin as endometrial cancer, Dr. Castrillon said. The median survival of women with advanced endometrial cancer is one year.........
Endometrial cancer is the most common cancer of the female reproductive tract, representing 6% of all cancers. There is currently no screening method or biomarker to indicate early presence of disease. "It is a very common malignancy that affects women of all ages" comments paper author Dr. Diego Castrillon. The cancer forms from the cells that grow along the inner lining of the uterus, which is called the endometrium, and commonly it is diagnosed following patient reports of abnormal bleeding.
The normal endometrium is a dynamic place, providing a thick, highly vascularized environment ready to generate a placenta if it is implanted with an embryo. The dynamic and cyclic activity of the endometrium makes it very sensitive to signaling molecules. Early changes in many signaling proteins are known to contribute to endometrial cancer in some patients. A major research goal is to understand how signals create cancer cells and to identify places where intervention might shut down the signals that promote cancer cell survival and growth.
Scientists learn about cancer by creating genetic changes to signaling proteins in mice that reflect changes found in human cancer patients. Animal models are produced in this way to help understand how cancer cells form and progress. One challenge is to localize genetic changes to the environment of interest. In the case of endometrial cancer, scientists need to specifically modify only those cells that are in the endometrium, so that their data is not complicated by changes in other tissues.........
Sociologists at Case Western Reserve University observed that when passive cancer patients become survivors, they have plenty of bold advice to offer other cancer patients, as per a research studyin JAGS, the Journal of American Geriatric Society
Eva Kahana, Robson Professor of Sociology and director of the Elderly Care Research Center at Case Western Reserve, reported the findings from interviews with 100 cancer survivors. These survivors are part of a longitudinal study of 1,107 older adults living in a retirement community.
This study calls attention to generally accepting, timid behaviors that elderly patients report about their interactions with the healthcare system while battling cancer. Nevertheless the very same elderly adults offer advice to other older cancer patients to take a more activist stand and become advocates in their care.
This finding of the study overturns the notion that elderly patients are disinterested and disempowered health consumers, Kahana said.
For nearly 20 years, the longitudinal study's research team gathered information from this Florida retirement community to find out what older people do to age successfully and weather chronic illnesses and the frailties in their later years.
In the study's 17th year, cancer survivors were given an in-depth interview with open- and close-ended questions about their cancer experience. The participants were of an average age of 79, married (62%) and were mostly women (62%). The predominant cancers were breast and prostate.........
Dr. Mamdooh Ghoneum is a researcher at Charles Drew University.
Credit: Charles Drew University
A researcher at Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science is investigating the potential use of non-pathogenic baker's yeast as a promising, natural treatment for cancer.
Dr. Mamdooh Ghoneum presented his findings Tuesday, Feb. 2 at a special conference on "Cell Death Mechanism," sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) at the Omni San Diego Hotel in San Diego.
"The central focus of the meeting is cell death regulation and how to mine and exploit it for therapeutic gain," a written assessment of the AACR special conference states. "This conference includes new complexities of cell death and cell survival, new technologies, and clinical translational aspects necessary for the evolution of new therapeutic strategies".
For more than two decades, Dr. Ghoneum has pursued a theory that cancer cells self destruct when exposed to small quantities of yeast.
In laboratory tests, Dr. Ghoneum exposed cancer cells to yeast and observed as they ingested the yeastthrough a process known as phagocytosisand then the cancer cells died. First, he investigated this phenomenon in test tubes (in vitro), introducing yeast to breast, tongue, colon, and skin cancers.
"I have no doubt that I am close to unlocking the mystery as to why cancer cells weaken to the point of destruction after eating common baker's yeast," Dr. Ghoneum said. "The cells just gravitate to the yeast. I call it fatal attraction".........
