Tag Archives: switzerland

Tumor determination in bowel cancer: Blood test replaces surgery

One of the challenges of personalised medicine is the development of treatment resistance. At the Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC) Vienna at the MedUni Vienna and Vienna General Hospital, a study is now commencing which involves patients with metastasized bowel cancer who are undergoing a new diagnostic method, namely liquid biopsy in the form of a blood test. The aim of this new method is to spot a tumor’s development of resistance early on and therefore adjust the treatment quickly and in a targeted manner…

Anaplastic lymphoma kinase immunohistochemistry testing comparable to, if not better than, fluorescence in situ hybridization testing

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. …

Mesothelioma: New Findings On Treatment Options

“Mesothelioma remains a difficult disease to find better treatment options for, so we asked whether high-dose hemithoracic radiotherapy would decrease the rate or delay the time of local recurrence after chemotherapy and radical surgery,” says lead author Prof Rolf A. Stahel, from the Clinic and Policlinic for Oncology, at the University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland, and current President of the European Society for Medical Oncology. The multicentre trial included 153 patients with surgically-treatable malignant pleural mesothelioma, who were first treated with three chemotherapy cycles of cisplatin and pemetrexed, followed by surgical removal of affected lung tissue, with the goal of complete removal of the cancerous areas of lung. …

Nivolumab shows signs of superior response rate compared to standard chemotherapy in advanced melanoma

“Previously-treated advanced melanoma patients have limited options,” says the study’s principal investigator, Professor Jeffrey Weber, Director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research Center of Excellence at the Moffitt Cancer Centre, Tampa, Florida. Nivolumab is an antibody in a class of drugs called ‘checkpoint inhibitors’, that act to relieve a critical brake placed on the immune system by the tumour itself. The drug then reinvigorates patients’ anti-tumour immune response and promotes shrinkage of the tumour…

Freezing semen doubles chances of fatherhood for men after treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma

In the first study to investigate the impact on fatherhood of freezing semen prior to cancer treatment, researchers questioned 902 male survivors of Hodgkin lymphoma in five European countries (France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland) and found that among the 334 who wanted to have children, the availability of frozen semen doubled their chances of doing so when compared with men who had not frozen their semen. Dr Marleen van der Kaaij (MD), who carried out the work while she was a PhD student at the University Medical Centre in Groningen (The Netherlands), said: "Our study shows that cryopreservation of semen before cancer treatment has a large impact: one in five children born after Hodgkin lymphoma treatment was born using cryopreserved semen. …

Alternative target for breast cancer drugs

"Our findings suggest that Ret kinase might be an attractive and novel alternative therapeutic target in selected groups of breast cancer patients," remarked Nancy Hynes, Professor at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Basel, Switzerland. "Initial experiments in mice that serve as model organisms for the study of breast cancer have revealed that specific inhibitors significantly block the spread of cancer and decrease the number of metastatic tumours found in the lungs." The scientists examined tumour tissue microarrays of more than 100 breast cancer patients who had undergone surgery to remove their tumours. Antibodies were used to detect the levels of Ret in the samples. …