Category Archives: Cancer Treatment

Younger, early breast cancer patients often undergo unnecessary staging, imaging procedures

Presented at a poster session at the 2013 CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium by Carlos Barcenas, M.D., assistant professor in MD Anderson’s Breast Medical Oncology, the study is the first to look at the issue of over-use of staging procedures, including imaging and tumor markers in the diagnosis setting, specifically in younger, early-stage breast cancer patients. Over-testing and unnecessary procedures extends beyond cancer care across the healthcare continuum. …

Retinoblastoma dysfunction promotes pancreatic cancer cell growth, study shows

Murray Korc, M.D., the Myles Brand Professor of Cancer Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine and a researcher at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, and colleagues have shown that the retinoblastoma protein, a tumor suppressor, often malfunctions in pancreatic cancer. That dysfunction enables an inhibitory protein to promote pancreatic cancer growth. The research was published online today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. As a result of the dysfunctional retinoblastoma protein, pancreatic cancer cells lose their ability to be inhibited by transforming growth factor-beta, or TGF-β, which is a key negative regulator of cell proliferation, according to Dr…

Increased survival for metastatic prostate cancer with chemotherapy, hormone therapy together

The independent Data and Safety Monitoring Committee overseeing the trial recommended to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of NIH, that the study results be made public because a recent planned interim analysis showed prolongation in overall survival. Full details from this early analysis will be presented at a scientific meeting in 2014 and in a peer-reviewed publication. The study enrolled 790 men with metastatic prostate cancer between July 2006 and November 2012 in a trial known as E3805. …

Blocking tumor-associated macrophages decreases glioblastoma’s growth, extends survival in mice

The rates of apoptosis, or programmed cell death, were higher in the mice treated with the experimental agent than in the untreated animals that also had high-grade glioblastomas, said Johanna Joyce, Ph.D., of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City. …

Evidence of savings in accountable care organizations, cancer care

Researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice report that savings may be found in accountable care organizations (ACO) through reductions in hospitalizations. The analysis published in the December issue of the journal Healthcare provides the first empirical evidence on how the shared savings ACO model may affect the cost and experience of care for cancer patients. The researchers looked at the Physician Group Practice Demonstration, which ran from 2005 to 2010 in 10 physician groups, for the best current evidence on the likely effectiveness of accountable care organizations for Medicare beneficiaries…

Helping cancer researchers make sense of deluge of genetic data

The tool, called the Gene Expression Barcode 3.0, is proving to be a vital resource in the new era of personalized medicine, in which cancer treatments are tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual patient’s tumor. Significant new improvements in the Gene Expression Barcode 3.0 are reported in the January issue of the journal Nucleic Acids Research, published online ahead of print. Senior author is Michael J. Zilliox of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. …

First in-human trial of endoxifen shows promise as breast cancer treatment

"We achieved up to 60 fold higher levels of endoxifen compared to endoxifen levels achieved with the standard dose of tamoxifen," says Matthew Goetz, M.D., a Mayo Clinic oncologist and lead author of the study. "We have seen evidence for tumor regression in patients who had failed standard hormonal therapies including aromatase inhibitors, fulvestrant and tamoxifen. This is an exciting first step in the development of this drug." Tamoxifen is a hormonal therapy that has been used for over 40 years to reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence and to prevent breast cancer. …

Childhood cancer survivors suffer long-term symptoms linked to poor quality of life

"The prevalence of these symptoms accounts for a huge variance in physical, mental and social domains of quality of life among survivors," said I-Chan Huang, Ph.D., an associate professor of health outcomes and policy in the UF College of Medicine and the lead author of the study. "If we think symptoms are the key to patients’ quality of life, then if we can better manage their symptoms, we can improve their daily functional status and quality of life." Huang, also a member of UF’s Institute for Child Health Policy, teamed with researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis to conduct the study, which was published in the Nov. 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology…

Systems medicine paves way for improved treatment for leukemia patients

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, FIMM, and the Helsinki University Central Hospital has developed a novel individualized systems medicine (ISM) strategy which enables selection of potentially effective cancer therapies for individual patients. Furthermore, this strategy helps in understanding and predicting drug resistance and may pave a path for individualized optimization of patient therapies in the clinic for various types of cancers. Many novel targeted drugs have been introduced to the clinic for cancer therapy, often guided by genomic clues on disease pathogenesis. Clinical treatment of cancer patients is, however, challenged by the fact that genomics is often not informative in selecting therapies to individual patients…