Tag Archives: clinical-cancer

Game-changing shift occurring in cancer discovery, treatment

Clinical Cancer Advances 2013: ASCO’s Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer reveals how marked expansion in our knowledge and understanding of cancer is already improving treatment while also pointing the way towards even more effective approaches in the future. Published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the ASCO report covers a broad range of cancer types and highlights a selection of the most recent achievements across the entire continuum of cancer care, from prevention and screening to treatment and survivorship. "For patients today, these results can be critical. Scientifically, they demonstrate how our long term investment in science and technology can yield practical advances now and in the near future," said ASCO President Clifford A…

Ovarian cancer discovery deepens knowledge of survival outcomes

The research, led by Dong-Joo (Ellen) Cheon, PhD, found that the 10-gene biomarker panel may identify the aggressiveness of a patient’s disease, help predict survival outcomes and result in novel therapeutic strategies tailored to patients with the most adverse survival outcomes. When a patient’s tumor is identified as having elevated levels of these 10 specific genes, doctors may be able to better predict which treatments would be most effective, said Cheon, whose research was published in Clinical Cancer Research. That is an important advance because ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecologic cancer and is often diagnosed in later, more aggressive stages, resulting in poor prognosis and survival. These outcomes differ due to development of tumors that become resistant to chemotherapy. …

Oral drug may improve survival in men with metastatic prostate cancer

The study, published on Nov. 19, 2013, in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, adds long-term survival and safety data for the drug tasquinimod, a new candidate for treating advanced and recurrent prostate cancer. “While all subgroups in the clinical trial benefited from tasquinimod, those whose cancer metastasized to their bones had the greatest benefit in terms of delaying the time from the start of treatment to when the cancer progressed,” said lead author Andrew J…

Finding antitumor T cells in a patient’s own cancer

In a paper recently published in Clinical Cancer Research, investigators in the lab of Daniel Powell, PhD, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, demonstrated for the first time that a T cell activation molecule can be used as a biomarker to identify rare antitumor T cells in human cancers. The molecule, CD137, is a protein that is not normally found on the surface of resting T cells but its expression is induced when the T cell is activated…

Oxygen levels in tumors affect response to treatment

tumors with lower levels of oxygen — known as hypoxia — often respond less well to radiation therapy. There are several agents that can be given to patients before radiotherapy to reduce hypoxia, but these are not given as standard. Being able to measure how well-oxygenated an individual’s tumor is would give doctors a valuable way of identifying which patients might benefit from treatment with hypoxia reducing agents before radiotherapy. Hypoxia has previously been investigated by looking at the expression of certain genes, and Manchester researchers have come up with a genetic profile for tumors that should indicate the overall level of oxygenation…