From US News and World Report

Report from leading oncologists’ group finds strides were made against tough-to-treat tumors

TUESDAY, Dec. 6 (HealthDay News) — As the war against cancer continues, a group representing U.S. oncologists has picked its “Top Five” list of advances in cancer care for 2011.

Leading the list are approvals for a bevy of new, targeted drugs for tough-to-treat malignancies, plus promising results suggesting CT chest scans may be an early-detection screen for lung cancer.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) this week issued its annual report on progress against cancer. The report was published online Dec. 5 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

“The big news has been targeted drug therapy,” noted Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang, head of the section of genitourinary cancer at the Nevada Cancer Institute in Las Vegas and co-executive editor of the report.

“We now have drugs that are very selective for some solid tumors. We now have [new] drugs affecting melanoma and lung cancer, which is pretty sweet,” he said. “We don’t know how long the responses to these drugs last — they appear to be pretty short — but some of them are truly dramatic.”

CT-based lung cancer screening was the other big news in the cancer field this past year, Vogelzang noted. “People who smoke have a huge increase in lung cancer — 40 times that of the general population. If you stop the risk drops, but it never goes back to zero.”

Accuracy of small lung cancer detection on chest radiographs is higher when using bone suppression imaging with a standard radiograph, and the accuracy improves when using dual-energy subtraction radiography, according to a study published in the December issue of Radiology.

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 30 (HealthDay News) — Accuracy of small lung cancer detection on chest radiographs is higher when using bone suppression (BS) imaging with a standard radiograph, and the accuracy improves when using dual-energy subtraction (DES) radiography, according to a study published in the December issue of Radiology.

Researchers hope to detect genes that could warn of capacity for the cancer

Scientists and researchers in Chile are working to develop technology that could help diagnose lung cancer at an earlier stage. The new technology will seek to identify genes that indicate a predisposition to certain cancers.

Lung cancer is the second deadliest cancer in Chile. Only 16-17 percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer in Chile live longer than five years. Every year 500 people die from the illness and almost 1,900 more are diagnosed.

The research is being conducted in a joint effort between the British Columbia Cancer Agency (BCCA) based in Canada, the Center of Technology for Cancer (CeTeCancer) and the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, which is part of the Universidad de Chile.

PHOENIX, Nov. 18, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — VisionGate, Inc., a company developing a revolutionary non-invasive test for the early detection of lung cancer, today reported that it was awarded the 2011 Arizona Governor’s Celebration of Innovation Award for Innovator of the Year–Start-Up Company. VisionGate is developing LuCED(TM), a non-invasive lung cancer screening test that analyzes cells using the company’s breakthrough automated Cell-CT(TM) system. LuCED is initially being developed for use in conjunction with x-ray computed tomography (CT) screening to reduce false positive rates in early lung cancer detection. Data supporting the utility of the VisionGate technology were presented at a prestigious lung cancer conference earlier this year, and VisionGate recently entered several strategic partnerships for the clinical assessment of the LuCED technology.

“We are honored to be named the Arizona Start-Up Company Innovator of the Year,” commented Alan Nelson, PhD, chairman and CEO of VisionGate. “We believe that the scientific and corporate advances we achieved over the past year provide a solid foundation for the accelerated development of the Cell-CT technology and LuCED test now underway. By combining the high accuracy and cost effectiveness of our non-invasive LuCED diagnostic with the proven ability of CT screening to reduce lung cancer deaths, we hope to make mass screening feasible and affordable.”

The metabolism of lung cancer patients is different than the metabolism of healthy people. And so the molecules that make up cancer patients’ exhaled breath are different too. A new device pioneered at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and Nobel-Prize-winning Technion University in Haifa, Israel uses gold nanoparticles to trap and define these molecules in exhaled breath. By comparing these molecular signatures to control groups, the device can tell not only if a lung is cancerous, but if the cancer is small-cell or non-small-cell, and adenocarcinoma or squamous cell carcinoma.

“This could totally revolutionize lung cancer screening and diagnosis,” says Fred R. Hirsch, MD, PhD, investigator at the CU Cancer Center and professor of medical oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “The perspective here is the development of a non-traumatic, easy, cheap approach to early detection and differentiation of lung cancer.”

The proof of concept, recently published in the journal Nanomedicine, showed that in a preliminary study the device clearly distinguished between the volatile organic compounds in cancer patients’ exhaled breath compared to the breath of a control group. Subjects simply exhale into a bag, which separates superficial exhaled breath from breath that originated deeper in the lungs. And then this deep breath is analyzed by an array of gold nanoparticle sensors.

(HealthNewsDigest.com)- COLUMBUS, Ohio – Using just a few drops of blood, researchers have found that they could detect signs of lung cancer in patients two years before their tumors were visible using state-of-the-art body scans.

“What that means is that we may be on the verge of developing a blood test to detect lung cancer in it’s earliest stages” said Dr. Carlo Croce, Director of the Human Cancer Genetics program at Ohio Sate’s James Cancer Hospital.

Croce and his team discovered that molecules in the blood, known as microRNA, develop certain characteristic patterns when lung cancer first begins to form – and long before there are any visible signs of trouble. “The tumor is there, but it’s very small” said Croce, “it cannot be detected by conventional means but can be detected by looking at microRNA.”

The hot article on the cover of this month’s issue is from Andreas Keller and Christina Backes et al. whose artwork shows their discovery of novel microRNAs in peripheral blood of lung cancer patients. Using high-throughput SOLiD transcriptome sequencing they identified 76 previously unknown miRNAs and 41 novel mature forms of known precursors, which may potentially be used as biomarkers for the disease.

MDxHealth SA (NYSE Euronext: MDXH), a leading molecular diagnostics company in the field of personalized cancer treatment, today announced the results of a study indicating that several of its epigenetic biomarkers are able to confirm the presence of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) from routinely collected sputum samples of patients with stages I-IV of the disease. MDxHealth is developing a molecular diagnostic test, ConfirmMDx for Lung Cancer ^TM, to help physicians accurately assess the presence or absence of cancer genes. These important new data will be presented at the 5 ^th EORTC – NCI – ASCO Annual Meeting on Molecular Markers in Cancer in Brussels, Belgium (October 27-29)

In this particular NSCLC study based on samples from 92 patients, epigenetic analysis of MDxHealth’s proprietary biomarker RASSF1A, in combination with three other markers (TAC1, GREM1 and HOXA9), resulted in high sensitivity and specificity values of 75-80% and 90-96%, respectively. MDxHeath plans to conduct additional clinical studies to further optimize its ConfirmMDx ^TM lung cancer test.

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The US Department of Defense has awarded Boston University Medical School a $13.6 million grant to lead a multi-site study to discover molecular biomarkers that can be used for the early detection of lung cancer.

The five-year study will seek to identify markers that could help physicians decide which patients require biopsies after having CT scans and could predict which smokers who had no abnormalities in their CT scans will be most likely to get lung cancer.

The collaborators on the project will include military hospitals and Veteran’s Affairs centers across the country, as well as researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Brown University, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

VisionGate announced a collaboration with the Sheba Medical Center in Israel focused on evaluating the Arizona-based firm’s LuCED™ (lung cell evaluation device) test in conjunction with x-ray computed tomography screening for the detection of early lung cancer. The firm separately reported inking a collaboration with Greek researchers to evaluate the test as a primary screen in post-surgery lung cancer patients, and announced raising $2 million in the first tranche of an equity financing round that is projected to raise a total of $3 million.

The LuCED test is used in combination with the firm’s Cell-CT™ automated 3-D cell-imaging platform, which generates high-resolution biosignatures from intact cells in a sputum sample. Detected biosignatures are analyzed using a predictive analytics tool to indicate the presence or absence of cancer cells.

The initial indication for LuCED is as an adjunct to x-ray CT lung cancer screening, which, according to recently published data from the NCI’s National Lung Screening Trial, generates a high rate of false positive results when used alone. The collaboration between VisionGate and the Sheba Medical Center aims to evaluate whether LuCED, and other noninvasive techniques, can be used alongside x-ray CT to reduce the false-positive rate. The study will involve over 200 patients with pulmionary nodules detected by x-ray CT scans for whom the diagnosis remains unclear.