Clarient, Inc. (Nasdaq: CLRT), a premier technology and services resource for pathologists, oncologists and the pharmaceutical industry, today announced that data from a new study suggest that the Clarient Insight® Dx Pulmotax™ assay may effectively predict which lung cancer patients will respond favorably to chemotherapy. The study, titled “TLE3 expression is predictive of response to chemotherapy in NSCLC,” included 368 samples from carcinoma patients.  The majority of advanced-stage patients who were treated with chemotherapy received a treatment regimen containing a taxane class agent.

Pulmotax is a single antibody immunohistochemistry test created to detect the expression of TLE3 in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Prior data have linked TLE3 expression specifically to response to taxane therapy in breast and ovarian carcinoma patients. The study was presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) in Washington, D.C. by Douglas T. Ross, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Clarient.

Preliminary findings from the first clinical trial in lung cancer to use molecular analysis of tumor biopsy samples and an “adaptive” design to direct patients to a specific targeted therapy were presented at the AACR annual meeting in Washington, DC. In the study, dubbed BATTLE, patients had their tumor samples tested for specific biomarkers and were enrolled into one of four treatment arms, each one testing a different targeted therapy, based on that analysis. (See the box below.)

The first 97 patients to enroll in BATTLE were randomly assigned to one of the four treatment arms as would traditionally be done. After that point, new patients were assigned to one of the arms based on a statistical model called an adaptive Bayesian model. In addition to using the result of the biomarker analysis, the model made the assignment based on findings from patients who had already undergone treatment, which, as the trial proceeds, are fed back into the model.

The diabetes drug metformin helped prevent tumors in mice that were exposed to a cancer-causing agent found in tobacco, said researchers at the AACR annual meeting. Compared with untreated mice, those that received the drug had a 53 percent reduction in lung tumor burden after exposure to the carcinogen, which is called nicotine-derived nitrosamine. The animals were treated with an oral form of metformin for 13 weeks at drug levels that would be achievable in humans, the researchers said.

“Metformin is a very interesting drug for cancer prevention,” said lead researcher Dr. Phillip A. Dennis of NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, who presented the results. “We prevented over half of the lung tumors that would have occurred from exposure to the main carcinogen in tobacco, and that’s a real and important reduction.” Dr. Dennis’ group is planning a clinical trial to test the FDA-approved drug in people at highest risk of developing lung cancer, he said.

According to a new study, the researchers working with mice report they have gained insight into why lung cancer rates are going up in women, including those who don’t smoke. Margie Clapper, co leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Fox Chase Center in Philadelphia, in a statement, “Previous work has suggested that estrogen may play a role in lung cancer, but no one has shown that smoke can actually accelerate the metabolism of estrogen within the lungs”.

Preliminary findings from the first clinical trial in lung cancer to use molecular analysis of tumor biopsy samples and an “adaptive” design to direct patients to a specific targeted therapy were presented at the AACR annual meeting in Washington, DC. In the study, dubbed BATTLE, patients had their tumor samples tested for specific biomarkers and were enrolled into one of four treatment arms, each one testing a different targeted therapy, based on that analysis. (See the box below.)

Imagine this kind of warning on a cigarette package: Quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risk to your health, particularly if your DNA is mutated at the 15q24 locus. Would you get tested for this mutation?

Right now, there is no such test. But someday, there might be.

Years of study and a mountain of evidence point to tobacco smoking as the single most important risk factor for lung cancer. Nonsmokers (people who have smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes over the course of their lives) have less than a 1% chance of ever developing lung cancer…

When a doctor diagnoses cancer, the labels for the disease are awfully broad, a fact that hinders treatment.

Cancer, fundamentally, is a disease marked by specific changes in the genetic code of a person’s cancerous cells. So one case of lung cancer that appears clinically to be just like another may be quite different at a molecular level.

New research in mice suggests that metformin, a drug widely used to treat type 2 diabetes, may guard against lung cancer.

The drug’s prospects are not yet confirmed because researchers still need to test it in people. But, in mice, “this well-tolerated, FDA-approved diabetes drug was able to prevent tobacco carcinogen-induced lung tumors,” Dr. Phillip A. Dennis, senior investigator in the medical oncology branch of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, said in a news release from the American Association for Cancer Research.

New research offers hope that people with lung cancer will live longer if drug therapy is guided by the molecular traits of tumors.

“The goal is to match the correct drug with the right patient, based on the best tumor markers we have,” says Roy Herbst, MD, of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

So far, researchers have only shown that so-called targeted drugs seem to shrink tumors better if they are chosen based on tumors’ specific molecular traits, or biomarkers.

But there is a hint that these gains will someday translate into living longer, Herbst tells WebMD.

Metformin, a safe and inexpensive drug widely used to lower blood glucose in Type 2 diabetics, may have a variety of other uses, researchers are finding. The newest, reported Monday at a Washington meeting of the American Assn. for Cancer Research, is to prevent lung cancer in smokers.

Metformin inhibits a hormone called insulin-like growth factor-1, or IGF-1, which explains its anti-diabetes activity. But IGF-1 also plays a crucial role in cancer development, and a variety of observational studies have hinted that, by blocking its activity, metformin may inhibit cancer. Studies have shown, for example, that women being treated for breast cancer who are also diabetic and taking metformin have a threefold better response to their chemotherapy. Researchers are now organizing a clinical trial to test its effects.