LungBlog

Her tell-tale thinning hair hidden beneath a pink winter cap, Diane Andrews sat patiently at the starting point of Sunday’s Fight for Air Climb Detroit, waiting for her daughter and granddaughter.

The younger women had dedicated their Sunday morning to huffing up 70 stories to the top of the Detroit Renaissance Center. Their goal? To raise money for people like Andrews, who is battling lung cancer and enduring her fifth type of chemotherapy.

She didn’t smoke, and she didn’t have a family history of lung cancer.

What she had was prolonged exposure to high levels of the radioactive gas radon. It’s likely that thousands of other Georgians are being exposed, too.

“When you first get the diagnosis, it’s shocking,” said Dobbs, who is 59 and has lived in her Monroe home for 30 years. “You think … where could it possibly come from?”

Radon is an invisible and odorless gas that breaks down from uranium, granite, shale and phosphate and seeps into soil and water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it’s the leading cause of lung cancer in nonsmokers and causes up to 14 percent of all lung cancer deaths each year in the U.S. That’s about 22,000 people. Georgia leads the Southeast, according to the EPA, with an average of 822 deaths yearly.

Lange Productions announces today that “Be a Survivor – Lung Cancer Treatment Guide” (ISBN: 978-0-9819489-1-1) is the first book to offer a new approach to this frightening disease. It empowers patients to seek a cure, rather than accept defeat; to approach their diagnosis with hope, and shows them how to seek out effective treatments.

“Today lung cancer is not the automatic death sentence it once was,” says the author, Dr. Vladimir Lange. “New treatments, new drugs, and earlier diagnosis make survival much more likely than it was just a few years ago.”

Nearly two-thirds of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients treated with an experimental small molecule inhibitor of the ALK gene, PF- 02341066, had an objective response in a Phase I trial, according to data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research-International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer. Enrollment in the study was restricted to patient with ALK gene rearrangements, which predicted drug sensitivity in preclinical models.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE) — Lange Productions announces today that “Be a Survivor – Lung Cancer Treatment Guide” (ISBN: 978-0-9819489-1-1) is the first book to offer a new approach to this frightening disease. It empowers patients to seek a cure, rather than accept defeat; to approach their diagnosis with hope, and shows them how to seek out effective treatments.

“Today lung cancer is not the automatic death sentence it once was,” says the author, Dr. Vladimir Lange. “New treatments, new drugs, and earlier diagnosis make survival much more likely than it was just a few years ago.”

Lung cancer patients often struggle under the stigma that their disease was self-inflicted. Their physicians sometimes approach them with less optimism, citing the poor overall survival rates. Simply put, as a group, lung cancer patients are under-informed, and under-encouraged.

“The doctor told me I had eight months to live,” remembers Ed, a lung cancer survivor. “That was eleven years ago.”

Women who use hormone replacement therapy combining estrogen and progestin may have a higher risk of lung cancer than non-users, a new study finds.

Whether hormone replacement therapy (HRT) itself is to blame is not certain, researchers say. But the findings add to the complicated mix of potential health effects of HRT.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, looked at new lung cancer diagnoses among more than 36,000 women ages 50 to 75 who were followed over six years. During that time, 344 women developed the cancer.

Thanks (and unfortunately) to two-time Emmy Award winning actress Kathryn Joosten, prime time television will get a rare, but very small glimpse into the nation’s number one cancer killer: Lung cancer.

According to a Desperate Housewives producer, this Sunday night (February 28), Joosten’s Housewives character, pesky Mrs. McCluskey, will reveal that doctors have found a spot on her lung.

Clinical trials of a lung cancer vaccine have begun in Santa Maria, Marian Medical Center announced Monday.

The hospital’s Cancer Care Center, in collaboration with Central Coast Medical Oncology, is the only facility in the tri-county area to receive the vaccine being tested, said Dr. Brian DiCarlo of Central Coast Medical Oncology, the local principal investigator for the trials.

Memphis, Tn – Doctors are zeroing in on the link between being overweight and obese, and getting cancer. They say the connection is strong, and women don’t realize it.

It’s become a routine for Paula Brill. Every 15 days, comforted and kept warm by a blanket, she’s armed with her iPod. It’s a buffer, and a brief break from the reality of her world. Her life requires her body to receive a cocktail of medication, just to stay alive.

“You have to think positive, you have to believe you can win,” says Brill. It’s an attitude she adopted after her flashed before her eyes. “This doctor just looked at me and said well basically you’ve got a couple of years to live, and I just went into absolute shock.”

MM-121, Merrimack’s lead oncology therapeutic candidate, is an antibody designed to block signaling of ErbB3. This is the first of multiple trials that Merrimack and sanofi-aventis expect to initiate in 2010 as part of a broad Phase 2 clinical development program for MM-121.

Cambridge, Mass. (PRWEB) February 22, 2010 — Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced today that the first patient has received an initial dose in a Phase 1/2 clinical study combining MM-121 with Tarceva® (erlotinib) in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This is the first of multiple trials that Merrimack and sanofi-aventis expect to initiate in 2010 as part of a broad Phase 2 clinical development program for MM-121.