January 9, 2007, 4:59 AM CT

Tracing Agent, Ultrasound Combo And Cancer

An inexpensive tracing agent used in combination with ultrasound can pinpoint how effectively drugs targeting pancreas cancer work, scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have shown for the first time.

The study, involving human pancreatic tumor cells implanted in mice, opens a new avenue for real-time imaging of a patient's response to cancer therapies. It appears in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

The UT Southwestern research team focused on pancreas cancer because it is one of the deadliest cancers, characterized by extensive local invasion and metastasis to the liver, said Dr. Rolf Brekken, assistant professor of surgery and pharmacology and the study's senior author. The five-year survival rate ranges from only 1 percent to 4 percent for patients diagnosed with the most severe form of cancer of the pancreas called pancreatic andenocarcinoma.

"The current best treatment - including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy - has done little to alter cancer-related deaths of these patients, emphasizing the need for more effective therapy," said Dr. Brekken, a researcher at the Nancy B. and Jake L. Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research at UT Southwestern.

The research team examined how pancreatic tumor cells respond to an experimental anti-cancer agent that targets vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein responsible for triggering the development of blood vessels that deliver nutrients and oxygen to tumors, enabling them to grow and spread. Drugs that target VEGF are in a class called anti-angiogenic agents that are designed to choke tumor growth by reducing the number of blood vessels feeding the cancer.........

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January 8, 2007, 9:28 PM CT

Nanoparticles Pack Multiple Assault On Tumors

A collaborative team led by Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research at UC Santa Barbara (Burnham) has developed nanoparticles that seek out tumors and bind to their blood vessels, and then attract more nanoparticles to the tumor target. Using this system the team demonstrated that the homing nanoparticle could be used to deliver a "payload" of an imaging compound, and in the process act as a clotting agent, obstructing as much as 20% of the tumor blood vessels. These findings are pending publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be made available at the journal's website during the week of January 8, 2007.

The promise of nanomedicine is based on the fact that a particle can perform more functions than a drug. Multifuncionality is demonstrated in the current study, in which scientists from Burnham, UC San Diego, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a nanoparticle that combined tumor-homing, self-amplification of the homing, obstructing tumor blood flow, and imaging.

Using a screening technique developed previously in Ruoslahti's laboratory, the group identified a peptide that homed to the blood vessels, or vasculature, inside breast cancer tumors growing in mice. The peptide was comprised of five amino acids: Cysteine-Arginine-Glutamic acid-Lysine-Alanine, abbreviated CREKA.........

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January 7, 2007, 8:37 AM CT

Shed Pounds And Keep Cancer At Bay

While millions of Americans place fitness as one of their top New Year's resolutions to improve shape, muscle tone and overall appearance, cancer survivors have another priority - life.

Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have developed a customized fitness program to help survivors of endometrial cancer - or cancer of the uterus - shed pounds and keep cancer at bay. Karen Basen-Engquist, Ph.D., principal investigator of the five-year "Steps to Health" study and associate professor in the Department of Behavioral Science, aims to determine how well participants adhere to a personalized fitness plan, motivation both for beginning and sustaining regular workouts and the role of a support system in encouraging determination.

All endometrial cancer survivors who are six months post treatment - from M. D. Anderson or elsewhere - are eligible to participate in the Steps to Health study, funded by the National Cancer Institute.

Following an initial 30-minute orientation, including an electrocardiogram, researchers will assess participants at baseline and again every two months using a series of health and quality-of-life questionnaires, as well as fitness tests on an exercise bike. Depending on a participant's current physical ability, exercise physiologists and fitness specialists then will create a customized plan for each survivor.........

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December 28, 2006, 8:48 PM CT

New Drug Targets For Cancer

Solving a 100-year-old genetic puzzle, scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have determined that the same genetic mechanism that drives tumor growth can also act as a tumor suppressor. Their findings could lead to new drug targets for cancer therapies.

As per a research findings reported in the January 1 issue of Cancer Cell, Don Cleveland, Ph.D., UCSD Professor of Medicine, Neurosciences and Cellular and Molecular Medicine and member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, looked at a common characteristic of cancer cells called aneuploidy. Aneuploidy - the occurrence of one or more extra or missing chromosomes - was first proposed as the cause of malignant tumors nearly a century ago by German biologist Theodor Boveri, but his hypothesis had remained unproven.

"We questioned whether the wrong number of chromosomes contributed to tumor growth, or was a consequences of the accrued damage in malignant cells," said Cleveland.

To find out, scientists in the Cleveland lab created and analyzed mouse models with cells having a highly variable number of chromosomes to discover if such aneuploidy made the mice more tumor-prone.

"We observed that, with age, having cells which inherited the wrong composition of chromosomes resulted in a larger number of spontaneous tumors," said Cleveland. But the more unexpected feature of their findings was discovered when the research team added other genetic errors to mice with a high rate of aneuploidy - tumor development was slowed.........

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December 18, 2006, 8:16 PM CT

Black Women And Breast Cancer Survival

Many previous studies have shown that African-American women generally perform worse when it comes to breast cancer survival. This is true even after taking into consideration such factors as tumor size and socioeconomic differences, as per a new study.

"I think it's due to biological factors in the actual cancer, and this means that race may be a surrogate for a more adverse molecular profile within the cancer," said Dr. Kathy Albain, the study's senior researcher and a professor of medicine at Loyola University Chicago Medical Center.

This study utilized database from two previous clinical trials done in the early 1990s.

The study included 317 pairs of women -- 317 black and 317 white. All these patients had been treated for early-stage breast cancer with chemotherapy and who had been followed after treatment over 10 years.

The survival rate of the white women after 10 years was 86 percent compared to 76 percent for the black women.

All the women had the same tumor stage and were treated identically. The potential influence of age, tumor differences, education level and socioeconomic status also was considered.

The study then took into account the fact that black women were more likely to have discontinued treatment early, to have missed appointments or delayed treatment and had lower initial white blood cell counts. But they had the same relative doses of total chemotherapy delivered during treatment.........

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December 18, 2006, 7:35 PM CT

Estrogen Use And Colon Cancer

In a number of prior studies scientists have found that estrogen intake by elderly women would decrease the risk of colon cancer. A new study conducted by Dana-Farber cancer institute gone from this finding. This study showed that postmenopausal women with colon cancer would live longer if they have been taking estrogen supplements within five years of their diagnosis. This becomes an interesting finding given the fact that postmenopausal estrogen usage has been on decline recently because of reports of increased risk of breast cancer linked to its use.

In this new study, which is reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers examined the effect of estrogen use on the survival of older women already diagnosed with the disease.

The scientists are not suggesting that women should be taking postmenopausal hormone therapy to prevent colon cancer risk. With estrogen use has dropped sharply among postmenopausal women in recent years, due to concerns about its role in heart disease and breast cancer, numerous studies have shown it significantly lowers the chances of developing colorectal cancer considering the other health risks linked to its use. Scientists are hoping that this finding would lead to development of new drugs from the clues obtained.........

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December 15, 2006, 4:35 AM CT

Cancer Growth and NSAIDs

What is the key mechanism behind the anti-cancer potential of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents? Researchers have been pondering this question for some time. Now researchers have discovered that, induction of a gene called MDA-7/IL-24 is the molecular mechanism that enables non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to halt the growth of cancer cells, a finding that could eventually lead to the development of targeted cancer therapies.

Led by scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), in collaboration with researchers at Columbia University Medical Center, the new findings provide the answer to the long-puzzling question: How does this popular class of pain killers protect people from developing this deadly disease" The study appears in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Cancer Research.

"Eventhough findings based on observation had previously demonstrated that NSAIDs [such as aspirin, ibuprofen and sulindac] might be effective in the prevention and therapy of several common cancers, it wasn't at all clear how this was happening," explains the study's senior author Towia Libermann, PhD, Director of the BIDMC Genomics Center and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "Now, after treating many different types of cancer cells in culture with a whole set of NSAIDs, we can point to this single gene which, when upregulated, kills cancer cells while sparing normal, healthy cells".........

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December 13, 2006, 6:35 PM CT

International Tykerb Clinical Trial

A clinical trial of a new targeted breast cancer drug, led by physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center, has begun enrolling patients. The TEACH (Tykerb Evaluation After CHemotherapy) trial will investigate the experimental drug Tykerb (lapatinib) in patients with early-stage, HER2-positive breast cancer who have not been treated with Herceptin, another targeted drug used for the same type of tumor. The MGH is the lead institution for the international trial, which is being sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Tykerb.

"This trial represents another step toward understanding the role of targeted therapies in extending disease-free survival," said Paul Goss, MD, PhD, director of Breast Cancer Research at the MGH Cancer Center, who proposed the TEACH study and chairs the International Steering Committee.

About one quarter of patients with breast cancer have tumors that overexpress or produce too a number of copies of a receptor molecule called HER2. Because cellular growth is stimulated by the overactivity of this molecule, which also is called ErbB2, these tumors are more likely to recur and are less responsive to hormone-based therapys. Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody that blocks the HER2 receptor, is approved by the FDA as an adjuvant therapy - given along with chemotherapy after surgical removal and/or radiation treatment - for early-stage, node-positive and HER2-positive tumors as well as for metastatic tumors.........

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December 13, 2006, 4:42 AM CT

Older Men With Early Prostate Cancer Should Be Treated

Many cancer experts till now believed that early prostate cancer in older men need not be treated, but recent findings from an observational study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine suggest that men between 65 and 80 years of age who received treatment for early stage, localized prostate cancer lived significantly longer than men who did not receive treatment. The study would be published in the December 13th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Thanks to better cancer prevention education and the resulting wide-spread increase in using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screenings, more men are being diagnosed with early-stage and low-or intermediate-grade prostate cancer. Studies have shown that the slow-developing nature of prostate cancer during its earliest stages makes treatment options, such as a radical prostatectomy (surgical removal of the prostate) and radiation therapy, controversial with unpredictable outcomes. Often, recently diagnosed men of this group were advised to just "watch and wait" to see how their situation progressed.

"For this study we looked back over the existing data of a large population of prostate cancer patients, aged 65 to 80, with small tumors that were at a low or intermediate risk of spreading," said senior author Katrina Armstrong, MD, MSCE, who worked on the study with colleagues from Penn's Abramson Cancer Center, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Leonard Davis Institute of Health and Economics, and Division of Internal Medicine, and Fox Chase Cancer Center. "After accounting for all their differences, we discovered that the men - who within six months of diagnosis underwent surgery or radiation therapy - were 31 percent less likely to die than those who did not undergo treatment during that time".........

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December 12, 2006, 5:07 AM CT

It Gives Much More To Quitting Than Exercise

A study of more than 36,000 women by scientists from the Universities of Minnesota and Pennsylvania observed that a high level of physical activity in women who smoked reduced their risk of developing lung cancer by nearly three quarters, compared with smokers who did no exercise.

Reported in the recent issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention, the study also found 'moderate' activity among smokers was linked to a 65 per cent risk reduction, and lower relative risks were also seen in former smokers who had moderate or high activity levels.

However, the scientists pointed out that despite seeing benefits in exercise, the absolute risk of developing lung cancer is still very large in current and former smokers regardless of activity level.

The study's lead author, Kathryn Schmitz, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, explained: "Smokers who exercise are at a 35 per cent lower risk of developing lung cancer relative to smokers who don't exercise, but if you smoke at all, your risk of developing lung cancer is 10- to 11- fold higher than if you didn't smoke".

"The most important thing a smoker can do to reduce risk is to quit smoking. That said, exercising and being active can offer a marginal change in risk," she added.........

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