LungBlog

Ann Hunt, lung cancer survivor, “They scanned my kidney, thought I had a kidney stone, and found a golf ball size mass on the right bottom of my lung.”

And to the surprise of this non-smoker…it was cancer. The news caught them offguard.

A new treatment developed by an Oklahoma physician may help lung cancer patients who have trouble breathing.Lung cancer sufferers may experience fits of coughing, shortness of breath and difficult-to-treat pneumonia because tumors block the bronchioles, which are the passages through which they receive air.

She went to doctors with “tremendous pain” in her shoulder and further tests revealed she had lung cancer.

She was officially diagnosed last month.

Doctors believe she has had the disease for at least two years. She had been feeling tired but thought it was due to her heavy workload.

Shares of Sunnyvale-based Pharmacyclics plunged more than 26 percent Monday - the fourth-biggest drop in its history - after federal regulators refused to approve its drug Xcytrin to treat patients whose lung cancer has spread to their brain.

In colon and lung cancer trials, women were less likely to be enrolled than men, and at all study sites, the rates of participation in trials was extremely low, from 0.04 to 1.7 percent.

Dr. John H. Stewart IV, the lead author and an assistant professor of surgery at Wake Forest University, said the disparities could call the results into question. “Our ability to generalize the findings of surgical trials,” he said, “is directly dependent on having equitable participation in trials by underrepresented groups.”

One of the deadliest forms of cancer appears to carry a specific weakness.

When a key gene called 14-3-3zeta is silenced, lung cancer cells can’t survive on their own, researchers have found.

The gene is a potential target for selective anti-cancer drugs, says Haian Fu, PhD, professor of pharmacology, hematology & oncology at Emory University School of Medicine and Emory Winship Cancer Institute.

“The initiation of this study is another important milestone for our Hsp90 inhibitor program,” said David Grayzel, M.D., vice president, clinical development and medical affairs, Infinity. “We are encouraged by the evidence of biological activity we saw in the Phase 1 portion of the study and are eager to further evaluate IPI-504 in Phase 2. Non-small cell lung cancer is an aggressive disease and we are grateful to the patients, their families, and the outstanding caregivers collaborating with us in order to develop potential new treatment options.”

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a more sophisticated way of predicting the risk of developing lung cancer.

Two-thirds of lung cancer cases in the UK could be predicted by screening only 30% of the population using the Liverpool Lung Project (LLP) risk model – funded in collaboration with the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation.

The model differs from previous ones, which only focused on age and smoking status and fail to account for other groups at risk.

Doctors are hoping to recruit 2,400 people with lung cancer for a trial to see if a drug has anti-cancer effects and can prevent blood clots.

 Cancer cells tend to be more squishy than their normal counterparts, a new study using nanotechnology has shown.