ALK tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) shrink tumors and increase progression-free survival in late-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients positive for ALK as determined by the fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) test, a test for DNA rearrangement within the gene. …
Successful treatment depends in part on accurately identifying the type of tumor, but this can be difficult. As a result, many women with cancer are not sent to the right specialist surgeon, or those with a benign cyst may have a more serious operation than they need. In a study published today in the British Medical Journal, an international team led by Imperial College London and KU Leuven, Belgium describe a new test, called ADNEX, which can discriminate between benign and malignant tumors, and identify different types of malignant tumor, with a high level of accuracy. The test is based on the patient’s clinical information, a simple tumor marker blood test and features that can be identified on an ultrasound scan…
“When chemotherapy is administered after the first trimester of pregnancy, we cannot discern any problems in the children,” says lead author Dr Frederic Amant, KU Leuven and University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium. “Fear about the risks of chemotherapy administration should not be a reason to terminate a pregnancy, delay cancer treatment for the mother, or to deliver a baby prematurely.” Concerns about the potential impact of cancer treatment on unborn children has until recently left some oncologists hesitant to administer treatments to pregnant cancer patients, says Amant. To address these concerns, his group has led three new studies presented at ESMO 2014. …
Despite this new evidence for the effectiveness of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing to reduce mortality, doubts as to whether the benefits of screening outweigh the harms remain, and routine PSA screening programmes should not be introduced at this time, conclude the authors. The European Randomised study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) began in 1993 to determine whether screening men for PSA reduces deaths from prostate cancer. …
The work by Professor Pierre Sonveaux’s team, at Université catholique de Louvain’s Institute of Experimental and Clinical Research (IREC), succeeded in pinpointing a family of pharmaceutical compounds whose action prevents the appearance of tumor metastasis. The researchers achieved this tour de force by studying the mitochondria in tumor cells. These organelles are considered as the cells’ power station…
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140703142417.htm
source : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140428121301.htm
But the society has also warned that a worrying lack of information about the situation in Eastern Europe must be urgently addressed. Published in the Annals of Oncology this week, the survey provides the first detailed information on the current number of medical oncologists in 12 European Union countries, mostly in Western Europe, and their predicted availability by 2020. Around the world countries are struggling to ensure their medical oncology systems can deal with the increase in cancer cases, says ESMO Press Officer Solange Peters, a lung cancer expert from the university of Lausanne, Switzerland. Until now, nobody could say what the situation was in Europe. …
"NeoALTTO is a randomized, phase III clinical trial evaluating whether a combination of two HER2-targeted therapies, trastuzumab and lapatinib, given with standard paclitaxel chemotherapy before surgery [neoadjuvant therapy] is better than just one of the HER2-targeted therapies given with the same chemotherapy," said Martine Piccart-Gebhart, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Breast International Group (BIG) in Brussels, Belgium. …
About 50 percent of melanomas, and less frequently other cancer types, harbor mutations in the BRAF oncogene. …