Tag Archives: cancer

Pfizer takes its shot at a vaccine for evasive MRSA superbug

Kathrin Jansen is a microbiologist with at least two breakthrough vaccines to her name: she brought the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil to market for Merck and helped develop the $4 billion a year pneumonia and meningitis vaccine Prevnar 13 for Pfizer. Jansen's next vaccine success could come by taming the superbug MRSA, a drug-resistant bacterium that she has seen ravage a healthy man up close and personally. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infects an estimated 53 million people globally and costs more than $20 billion a year to treat. In the United States alone, MRSA kills 20,000 Americans each year, exceeding annual deaths from AIDS. Jansen watched the infection unfold two years ago when visiting her stepfather, who was in the hospital for a hip replacement. The man in the bed next door died soon after MRSA attacked the vascular graft in his leg. “He went in healthy and died very quickly,” recalls Jansen, senior vice president of vaccine research and early development at Pfizer Inc, the world's largest drug maker. She says the experience steeled her resolve to develop an effective vaccine that could prevent such deaths. But Staphylococcus aureus has proven a tenacious adversary. In the past decade, vaccine candidates by Nabi Biopharmaceuticals and Merck & Co Inc failed in costly, late-stage clinical trials. Now, led by Jansen, Pfizer is taking a shot. Competitors, including vaccine giants GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Sanofi, are, too. And while the race could lead to a viable vaccine, potentially worth billions in sales, critics say companies may be risking costly failure with so much work on a bacterium that is still barely understood. 'Bag of trouble' Staph has been living in and on its human hosts for centuries. At any given time, 25 to 35 percent of individuals will test positive for staph, often with no symptoms. But the bacterium can cause a range of diseases from boils and impetigo to raging blood infections and deadly bacterial pneumonia. The discovery of penicillin in 1928 gave doctors a way to defeat staph infections, but overuse and misuse gave rise to drug-resistant staph. Methicillin was developed to overcome drug-resistance, but by the 1960s, staph evolved new defenses to overcome this more powerful version of penicillin. Thus began the decades-long battle against methicillin-resistant staph, now the most common cause of hospital-acquired infections that is increasingly spreading into army barracks, prisons and daycare centers. Dr. Bill Gruber, a Pfizer senior vice president who led clinical trials for Prevnar 13 and is running the company's Staph aureus trials, thinks of the bacterium as “a little bag of trouble.” “Basically, it has a number of different toxins and defenses to try to defeat you.” That may explain why vaccines from Nabi and Merck failed. Both tried to defeat this bug by attacking on just one front. The vaccine by Nabi, now Biota Pharmaceuticals, focused only on the sugar capsule the bacteria make to hide from the immune system, while Merck's focused on a single protein that helps staph gets its nutrition. Neither lived up to expectations. “We've learned that just focusing on one target of Staph aureus might not be sufficient,” said Dr. Buddy Creech, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University. It takes stamina Jansen has been working on a Staph aureus vaccine for the past decade, first at Merck, then at Wyeth, and now at Pfizer. The East German-born scientist - who fled to the West in 1960 and earned her PhD in biology at Philipps University in Marburg - says it takes stamina to develop a successful vaccine, a process that can take 15 years or more. With the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil, which had 2012 sales of $1.6 billion, it took 14 years from lab bench to government approval. “That's actually a fast development program,” she said. With Staph aureus, it took eight years from the first experiments to human safety trials. Now, it could take another seven to 10 years to wind up clinical trials, putting the team about midway through the process. Pfizer's initial vaccine targeted three mechanisms key to staph's survival and ability to cause disease. Two of those focused on sugar capsules. The third attacks a mechanism called “clumping factor,” which allows bacteria to stick to proteins when they enter the body. But Jansen's team wanted one more point of attack. They added a fourth antigen, a protein that allows the bacterium to steal manganese - a key nutrient - from host cells. The result is a four-antigen vaccine that generates antibody responses at distinct points of the life cycle of the bug. The company is testing this in Phase 1/Phase 2 trials in healthy adults in the United States. If Pfizer gets the results they hope for, likely later this year, the company expects to meet with regulators to iron out a plan for larger trials involving thousands of individuals. Initially, the vaccine would be aimed at preventing infections in millions of people globally who need elective procedures such as a hip replacement. Ultimately, it could be used to protect people at risk in the broader community. Rival vaccines Pfizer is furthest along, but the large, untapped market, estimated to be worth $3 billion to $4 billion a year, has drawn interest from several companies. GlaxoSmithKline has been quiet about its approach. The drugmaker had been partnering with Nabi's failed StaphVax candidate, and in 2009 bought another Nabi candidate called PentaStaph for $46 million. Company researchers declined to discuss their program, but Glaxo spokeswoman Melinda Stubbee confirmed the company has a four-component vaccine in Phase 1 development. “We are still evaluating the data and haven't yet announced plans to present the data or to pursue further development,” she said. NovaDigm Therapeutics, a private company based in Grand Forks, North Dakota, is developing a single-antigen vaccine that targets both staph and yeast infections caused by the fungus Candida. Other rivals with early-stage programs include Novartis, which has a vaccine in Phase 1 trials, and Sanofi, which is partnering with privately held biotech Syntiron. Although academic researchers applaud these efforts, they say companies may be rushing into trials too soon, especially when so much is unknown about how staph interacts with people. “Our development of Staphylococcal vaccines has predated an adequate understanding of the human response to infection,” Creech said. For instance, it is still not clear whether a Staph aureus vaccine that protects against skin infections will also protect individuals from bloodstream infections. It may be that instead of preventing infection, some vaccines will merely blunt infection. Dr. Robert Daum, who leads the MRSA Research Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center, doubts any of the current candidates will make it into widespread use. “I am convinced we need a vaccine. I'm just not sure anyone knows how to make one yet.” Jansen, who knows Daum, said she understands his skepticism. “I'm a microbiologist. I know bacteria pretty well. They are very potent adversaries.” She says there's a reason the company was not the first out of the gate. “We wanted to make sure that we looked under all the rocks and found what we needed to find.” Tests in animals and people suggest the vaccine induces production of antibodies that defeat staph's defenses and kill the bacteria. “To our knowledge, we are the only ones who have demonstrated very, very robust killing responses.” That was enough for Jansen. “We essentially said, 'That's it. We put it together as best as we know how. Now is the time to test it.'”source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/23/pfizer-takes-its-shot-at-vaccine-for-evasive-mrsa-superbug/

Sugary drinks tied to kidney stone risk

Adults who drink at least one sugar-sweetened drink a day are slightly more likely to develop kidney stones than people who rarely imbibe them, according to a new study. While the recommendation for kidney stone prevention has been to drink a lot of fluids, the study suggests that it's not just the amount of fluid but the type of drink that also matters. Dr. Gary Curhan, the senior author of the study, said patients often ask for dietary advice to help prevent kidney stones. While the recommendation has been to drink plenty of fluids, Curhan said, patients often ask, “what should I drink? There's a lot of lore out there.” To see whether the type of beverage might matter, Curhan, of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and his colleagues collected data from three massive surveys of nearly 200,000 people. The questionnaires surveyed participants every two to four years and asked about diet, lifestyle and health, including how much they drank certain beverages and whether they developed kidney stones. None of the people in the study had kidney stones at the start. They found that 159 out of every 100,000 people who drank a sugar-sweetened non-cola beverage, such as clear soda, less than once a week developed kidney stones, compared to 306 out of every 100,000 who drank soda daily. After accounting for other factors, that translated to a 33 percent greater chance of developing kidney stones. Frequent punch drinkers also had an 18 percent higher chance of developing kidney stones. For every 100,000 people who drank punch at least every day, 226 developed kidney stones, compared to 158 out of every 100,000 participants who had punch less than once a week. Curhan said that while the numbers of people developing kidney stones in each group are not enormously different, the increased risk spread across an entire population is quite big. “Sodas are so commonly used that even though the absolute rate doesn't look that different, if there's a huge number of people consuming it, then the magnitude on the public health can be quite substantial,” Curhan told Reuters Health. Other drinks, such as coffee, tea, wine, beer and orange juice were tied to a lower risk of developing kidney stones. For instance, 205 out of every 100,000 people who rarely drank coffee developed kidney stones, compared to 137 out of every 100,000 people who drank it daily. Just 96 out of every 100,000 people who drank red wine daily developed kidney stones, while 174 out of every 100,000 people who drank red wine less than once a week developed kidney stones. Curhan's study, published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, follows others showing a link between stones and fructose, non-dairy calcium, vitamin C supplements and other factors. The new study doesn't prove cause-and-effect between certain drinks and kidney stones, but it's possible that sugar could be involved, Curhan said, because it might play a role in how the body handles calcium. Another possibility is that sugary drinks might be contributing to obesity, and obesity is also tied to a higher kidney stone risk, said Dr. Elaine Worcester, a professor at the University of Chicago, who was not part of the study. Despite the lack of proof of a cause-effect relationship, Worcester said “these kinds of studies are the best we have to give advice to our patients.”source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/23/sugary-drinks-tied-to-kidney-stone-risk/

How to exercise without eating more

Maintaining that delicate balance of eating enough to fuel your workouts and not overdoing it afterwards is a source of confusion for even the most educated exerciser. Sometimes, those post-workout hunger pangs hit, begging you to replace what you just burned off. Other times, your brain is telling you it's time to reward your hard work (with extra cheese). Related: Foods That Will Make You Look Younger Recent research from Australia has reopened the debate on this quandary: Is it possible to exercise and not eat more? While findings have been mixed, a review of studies published in the journal Appetite showed that exercise does not, in fact, lead to a significant increase in calorie consumption. Related: Stylish Male Athletes Who Became Models And calories might not matter much anyway, according to Equinox tier 4 coach Dr. Paul Spector.  “The goal of someone who says they want to lose weight is really to lose fat and gain muscle,” Spector said. “Therefore the real question with regard to exercise and nutrition is how to maximize the use of fat as a fuel source. It's about body composition, not weight.” More: The Worst Celebrity Eyebrows of All Time Want to train your body to burn more fat?

Polish man gets face transplant just 3 weeks after injury

WARSAW, Poland – & A 33-year-old Polish man received a face transplant just three weeks after being disfigured in a workplace accident, in what his doctors said Wednesday is the fastest time frame to date for such an operation. It was Poland's first face transplant. Face transplants are extraordinarily complicated and relatively rare procedures that usually require extensive preparation of the recipient over a period of months or years. But medical officials said the Polish patient's condition was deteriorating so rapidly that a transplant was seen as the only way to save his life. The patient is now being watched for any potential infections. In a photo taken Tuesday, just six days after the surgery, the patient, identified only by his first name, Grzegorz, was shown giving a thumbs-up sign from his hospital bed. Another picture, based on computer tomography, showed the extensive damage to his skull. He was injured in an April 23 accident at his job at a stone mason's workshop near the southwestern city of Wroclaw when a machine used to cut stone tore off most of his face and crushed his upper jaw. He received intensive treatment at a hospital in Wroclaw that saved his life and eyesight. But an attempt to reattach his own face failed, leaving an area close to the brain exposed to infections, doctors said. The damage was too extensive for doctors to temporarily seal the exposed areas. So he was taken to the Cancer Center and Institute of Oncology in Gliwice, the only place in Poland licensed to perform face transplants. The center has experience in facial reconstruction for patients disfigured by cancer and its experts have practiced face transplants on cadavers. Doctors at the center said the 27-hour face and bone transplant was performed May 15 soon after a matching donor was found. The surgery reconstructed the area around the eyes, the nose, jaws and palate and other parts of the man's face. Pictures show stitches running from above the patient's right eye, under the left eye and around the face to the neck. The donor, a 34-year-old man, was chosen from a national registry of potential donors after his age, gender, blood group and body features were determined to be a good match for the injured man. The head of the team of surgeons and other specialists, Dr. Adam Maciejewski, said it was the first time a face transplant was carried out so soon after the damage. Face transplants are usually a last resort after conventional reconstructive and plastic surgeries have been tried. “In such an extensive injury, where the structures close to the skull base and in contact with the brain area are exposed, any infection would be dangerous, not to mention the impossibility to function normally, including problems with breathing, with eating,” Maciejewski said. “All that led us in one direction.” “We assume the surgery will allow the patient to return to normal life. He will be able to breathe, to eat, to see.” Maciejewski said that over time, the face will mold to the man's facial bone structure and he will not look like the donor. The patient is now breathing on his own and responds to questions by nodding his head or squeezing the hands of doctors. But his condition is serious and it will be months before the procedure can be declared a full success, said Dr. Krzysztof Olejnik, head of the team of anesthesiologists. Another member of the transplant team, surgeon Dr. Maciej Grajek, told The Associated Press that the patient was receiving drugs to ward off any potential viral, bacterial or skin infections, but the face is alive and is healing. Though he is in sterile isolation, the patient has started the rehabilitation process. He will stay on special drugs for the rest of his life to prevent rejection of his new face. More than two dozen transplants of the face or parts of the face have been performed around the world. The first one was a partial face transplant in a woman maimed by her dog in France in 2005. Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, who in 2011 led a team in the United States that performed a full face and double-hand transplant on a woman mauled by a chimpanzee, said in an email he believes that in the future surgeons will decide more swiftly on a transplant, just as the Polish team did. “This is the way we likely will practice in the future,” said Pomahac, a reconstructive surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. However, he cautioned that patients should be given more time to be fully involved in a decision that will have a life-long impact on them. “I still think that a traumatized patient, even with all the psychological support, probably has a hard time making the right decision within hours/days after life-changing trauma,” Pomahac said. Dr. Zbigniew Wlodarczyk, who has performed limb transplants in Poland but was not involved in the face transplant, told the AP the surgery was groundbreaking because it was carried out on a fresh injury and on tissues that have not healed, but that leaving such an extensive wound open would have led to infection and the patient's death. “Such rare but spectacular procedures show the possibilities of medicine today and advance it,” he said.  ”This places Poland in the elite group of countries performing such transplants.  source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/23/polish-man-gets-face-transplant-just-3-weeks-after-injury/

Could eating less save your brain? Study shows reducing calories delays nerve cell loss

Calorie restriction may not always be fun, but cutting back has benefits beyond even weight loss. Studies have shown that eating less can help slow aging, prolong life and even decrease the effects of diseases like Alzheimer’s in a variety of organisms. Based on this knowledge, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to dig further and ask: Could calorie restriction also delay nerve cell loss in the brain – and the changes in learning and memory that go along with it? “We reasoned – and other folks reasoned – that because cognitive decline and neurodegeneration are characteristics of the aging process, that calorie restriction might also work in the brain to slow neurodegeneration,” lead study author, Dr. Johannes Gräff from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told FoxNews.com. Gräff and his colleagues tested their theory using a group of mice engineered to experience rapid neurodegeneration. Researchers decreased half of the mice’s calorie intake by 30 percent and kept the remaining mice on a normal diet. After three months, researchers tested the learning and memory skills in each group of mice, expecting to see a decline in both cognitive areas. However, while the mice eating normally showed evidence of significant learning and memory deficits related to nerve cell loss, the calorie-restricted mice showed no defecits in their learning or memory skills. “That was one of the first experiments we did, and that was quite promising and cool that it worked,” Gräff said. In the next phase of the study, researchers took a more in-depth look at the brains of both groups of mice. “What we further did was to look through the brains to check the extent or amount of neurodegeneration, and what we found was that neurodegeneration had been slowed down by calorie restriction,” Gräff said. Researchers were curious if reduced neurodegeneration could still be achieved by utilizing proteins activated during calorie restriction – without actually restricting calories. Eventually, they targeted an enzyme called Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1). “This protein is one candidate that has been known to be more abundantly expressed as a result of calorie restriction in our tissues,” Gräff said. The scientists then gave a separate group of mice, also engineered to experience rapid neurodegeneration, a pharmacological dose of SIRT1, without restricting their calorie intake. These mice experienced the same effects as the calorie-restricted mice, showing slower rates of nerve cell loss and no learning or memory deficits after a three-month period. Graff noted that more research needed to be done in this area, and he hopes to further explore the relationship between calorie restriction, SIRT1 and neurodegeneration. “We have the choice – (to look into how) to reduce calorie intake in order to slow onset of neurodegeneration, or we look to this pharmacological activator (to do the same thing),” Gräff said. “Do you want to engage more into reducing caloric intake or revert to pharmacological means for the same effect?” This study is published in the May 22nd issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/22/could-eating-less-save-your-brain-study-shows-reducing-calorie-intake-delays/

Study details genes that control whether tumors adapt or die when faced with p53 activating drugs

"The gene p53 is one of the most commonly mutated cancer genes. Tumors turn it off and then they can avoid controls that should kill them. Fine: we have drugs that can reactivate p53. But the bad news is when we go into the clinic with these drugs, only maybe one in ten tumors actually dies. …

Women escorted from mall for wearing “F— CANCER” hats

Two sisters were escorted from a mall in King of Prussia, Pa., on Sunday because they were wearing hats reading “F--- CANCER” with the “C” in the expletive replaced by a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon, the Philadelphia Daily News reported. Zakia Clark, 29, and Tasha Clark, 27, said that they were wearing the shirts to honor their mother, Jackie Underwood, who had passed away on May 14 at the age of 51 after a battle with breast cancer. The women, both from Philadelphia, were at the King of Prussia Mall with a group of friends and relatives, shopping for a dress for Zakia’s daughter to wear to their mom’s funeral. After two-and-a-half hours of shopping, the women were approached by a security guard in the mall’s food court. Zakia told the Philadelphia Daily News that the guard approached them without a greeting and said, “‘Take your hats off.’” Zakia removed her hat, but Tasha – a former mall employee – asked to see something in writing. “He said, 'Since you don't want to take your hat off, you can leave my mall,'” Zakia told the Philadelphia Daily News. “He stood there while we ate and threatened to call the cops.” The women stated that seven more guards then approached them and escorted them to the mall office. “I was very embarrassed,” Zakia told the Philadelphia Daily News. “My daughter was so scared she was crying.” At the mall office, the women were met by a police officer who had been called by mall security. “The officer said, 'I find it offensive that you even have that hat that says 'F--- CANCER,' ” Zakia recalled. “He said, 'It's their mall, they want you out, you have to get out.'” The women were escorted out of the mall, and two security cars waited by the sisters’ car until they left. After the Philadelphia Daily News looked into the incident, Les Morris, a spokesman for Simon Property Group in Indianapolis, IN., which owns King of Prussia Mall, called Zakia to apologize. “Certainly this could have been handled in a much more empathic and sensitive manner,” Morris told the People Paper. “We're very sorry about her loss and wanted to apologize for the way her party was treated.” “I do think this is an entirely different situation than a 16-year-old kid with a swear word on his T-shirt cruising the mall,” Morris said. Click for more from the Philadelphia Daily News.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/22/women-escorted-from-mall-for-wearing-f-cancer-hats/

Could eating less save your brain? Study shows reducing calorie intake delays nerve cell loss

Calorie restriction may not always be fun, but cutting back has benefits beyond even weight loss. Studies have shown that eating less can help slow aging, prolong life and even decrease the effects of diseases like Alzheimer’s in a variety of organisms. Based on this knowledge, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to dig further and ask: Could calorie restriction also delay nerve cell loss in the brain – and the changes in learning and memory that go along with it? “We reasoned – and other folks reasoned – that because cognitive decline and neurodegeneration are characteristics of the aging process, that calorie restriction might also work in the brain to slow neurodegeneration,” lead study author, Dr. Johannes Gräff from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told FoxNews.com. Gräff and his colleagues tested their theory using a group of mice engineered to experience rapid neurodegeneration. Researchers decreased half of the mice’s calorie intake by 30 percent and kept the remaining mice on a normal diet. After three months, researchers tested the learning and memory skills in each group of mice, expecting to see a decline in both cognitive areas. However, while the mice eating normally showed evidence of significant learning and memory deficits related to nerve cell loss, the calorie-restricted mice showed no defecits in their learning or memory skills. “That was one of the first experiments we did, and that was quite promising and cool that it worked,” Gräff said. In the next phase of the study, researchers took a more in-depth look at the brains of both groups of mice. “What we further did was to look through the brains to check the extent or amount of neurodegeneration, and what we found was that neurodegeneration had been slowed down by calorie restriction,” Gräff said. Researchers were curious if reduced neurodegeneration could still be achieved by utilizing proteins activated during calorie restriction – without actually restricting calories. Eventually, they targeted an enzyme called Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1). “This protein is one candidate that has been known to be more abundantly expressed as a result of calorie restriction in our tissues,” Gräff said. The scientists then gave a separate group of mice, also engineered to experience rapid neurodegeneration, a pharmacological dose of SIRT1, without restricting their calorie intake. These mice experienced the same effects as the calorie-restricted mice, showing slower rates of nerve cell loss and no learning or memory deficits after a three-month period. Graff noted that more research needed to be done in this area, and he hopes to further explore the relationship between calorie restriction, SIRT1 and neurodegeneration. “We have the choice – (to look into how) to reduce calorie intake in order to slow onset of neurodegeneration, or we look to this pharmacological activator (to do the same thing),” Gräff said. “Do you want to engage more into reducing caloric intake or revert to pharmacological means for the same effect?” This study is published in the May 22nd issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/22/could-eating-less-save-your-brain-study-shows-reducing-calorie-intake-delays/