Their paper publishes as the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference opens next week where experts from around the world will discuss how to tackle the threat to health and the waste of money caused by unnecessary care. …
“Waiting until the final days of life to begin hospice can shortchange patients and their families — skipping over many benefits of hospice care and limiting the opportunity to improve patients’ quality of life during this stressful time,” said study co-author David Casarett, MD, a professor of Medicine and director of Hospice and Palliative care at Penn Medicine. “Our findings point to some reasons why patients may seek hospice care so late in the course of their illness, which we hope will enable us to improve transitions to hospice at a more beneficial point in their care.” The team examined de-identified data from electronic medical records of 64,264 patients in 12 hospices in the Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness network from January 2008 to May 2013. …
Authors of the study are Dr. Chery A. Whipple, research associate at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and Dr. Constance Brinckerhoff, professor of Medicine and of Biochemistry at Geisel and member of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center. …
ALL is the most common childhood cancer. The research focused on a subtype of ALL known as Philadelphia chromosome-like ALL (Ph-like ALL)…
According to Miguel Ángel Quintela, head of the Unit: “The drug combination of paclitaxel and nintedanib has turned out to be a complete success, given that it is proved to be safe and that the pathologic complete response [rate of complete recovery] was 50%, which doubles the response compared to patients treated with standard therapy with paclitaxel.” The trial has also included 10 HER-2-negative breast cancer patients, all of them in early stages of the disease. In light of the results, the CNIO Breast Cancer Clinical Research Unit has already launched a large-scale Phase II Clinical Trial to validate the results in a large group of patients. These results, including biomarker studies that will facilitate advances in personalised medicine, will be released by early 2015. …
Now researchers at Thomas Jefferson University have discovered the unique biological properties inherent to colon cancer that make it a perfect candidate for immunotoxins — an antibody that won’t attach to normal cells and a toxin-delivery system that takes advantage of a fluke of biology: Colon cancer cells will gobble up poison if it’s attached to a key receptor on the cell’s surface. Indeed, the researchers demonstrated that the novel immunotoxin they created could reduce the lung metastasis in mice, which had grown out from colon cancers, by more than 80 percent with only 6 doses, in research published September 8th, 2014 in the journal Oncotarget. “These studies pave the way for effective antibody-directed therapy for metastatic disease in colorectal cancer, which currently carries a greater than 90 percent chance of mortality” says Scott Waldman, M.D., Ph.D., Chair of the Department of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics and the Samuel MV Hamilton Professor at Thomas Jefferson University. Dr…
Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic malignancy. Patients with early-stage disease are typically treated with surgery alone; however, patients with advanced endometrial cancer have higher instances of local or distant recurrence. Concurrent radiation therapy and chemotherapy after surgery is used to reduce the rate of recurrence in patients with advanced disease. This study, “A Phase 2 Trial of Radiation Therapy With Concurrent Paclitaxel Chemotherapy After Surgery in Patients With High-Risk Endometrial Cancer: A Korean Gynecologic Oncology Group Study,” evaluates the efficacy and toxicity of concurrent chemoradiation with weekly paclitaxel in patients with stage III and IV endometrial cancer. …
“Historically, scientists haven’t targeted the proteins in cancer cells that are involved in gene splicing,” said Zefeng Wang, PhD, associate professor in the department of pharmacology and senior author of the Cancer Cell paper. “This is a whole new ballgame in terms of gene regulation in cancer.” There are approximately 25,000 genes in the human genome — the same amount as in a fruit fly. But in humans, these genes are spliced together in different ways to create various kinds of messenger RNA to produce the many different proteins humans require…
“Historically, scientists haven’t targeted the proteins in cancer cells that are involved in gene splicing,” said Zefeng Wang, PhD, associate professor in the department of pharmacology and senior author of the Cancer Cell paper. “This is a whole new ballgame in terms of gene regulation in cancer.” There are approximately 25,000 genes in the human genome — the same amount as in a fruit fly. But in humans, these genes are spliced together in different ways to create various kinds of messenger RNA to produce the many different proteins humans require. It’s like a filmmaker splicing together bits of movie scenes to create alternative cuts of a movie…
“Impact of the Addition of Carboplatin and/or Bevacizumab to Neoadjuvant Once-Per-Week Paclitaxel Followed by Dose-Dense Doxorubicin and Cyclophosphamide on Pathologic Complete Response Rates in Stage II to III Triple-Negative Breast Cancer: CALGB 40603 (Alliance)” was accepted as a rapid publication and published online this month by the Journal of Clinical Oncology. It will come out in print in September. Because of its rapid growth rate, many women with triple-negative breast cancer receive chemotherapy to try to shrink it before undergoing surgery. …