Tag Archives: cancer-center

Decades of research: Effectiveness of phone counseling for cancer patients still unknown

“The answer is that we really don’t know yet,” says Sonia Okuyama, MD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and the paper’s first author. The small sample sizes of most studies, focus on non-Hispanic white patients (predominantly in breast cancer), varied design of the phone interventions offered, and lack of consistency in adhering to reporting guidelines means that despite a high number of published studies, few definitive findings are possible…

Drug regimen enough to control immune disease after some bone marrow transplants

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center scientists first used cyclophosphamide to prevent severe graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) after bone marrow transplant involving haploidentical or “half-matched” transplants, a treatment first used in 2000 at the Cancer Center to treat leukemias and other blood cancers. The scientists began to use post-transplant cyclophosphamide in clinical trials of fully matched bone marrow transplants in 2004. Now, the new multi-center study confirms that the post-transplant cyclophosphamide is safe and effective for people who have received fully-matched bone marrow transplants. The shortened regimen, described online Sept. …

Crizotinib treatment effective against ROS1-positive lung cancer, study suggests

“Prior to this study, there were a handful of reports describing marked responses to crizotinib in individual patients with ROS1-positive lung tumors,” says Alice Shaw, MD, PhD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center, lead author of the NEJM report. “This is the first definitive study to establish crizotinib’s activity in a large group of patients with ROS1-positive lung cancer and to confirm that ROS1 is a bona fide therapeutic target in those patients.” Crizotinib currently is FDA-approved to treat non-small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC) driven by rearrangments in the ALK gene, which make up around 4 percent of cases…

Sabotage as therapy: Aiming lupus antibodies at vulnerable cancer cells

The findings were published recently in Nature’s journal Scientific Reports. The study, led by James E. Hansen, M.D., assistant professor of therapeutic radiology at Yale School of Medicine, found that cancer cells with deficient DNA repair mechanisms (or the inability to repair their own genetic damage) were significantly more vulnerable to attack by lupus antibodies. “Patients with lupus make a wide range of autoantibodies that attack their own cells and contribute to the signs and symptoms associated with lupus…