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.”

Nov. 21, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Today, Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA), the leading national support and advocacy voice for those at risk for or living with lung cancer, issued its annual 2011 National Report Card on Lung Cancer, an overall assessment of the nation’s response to the continuing high mortality of lung cancer,the leading cause of cancer death.

2011 marks the 7th year of the release of the National Report Card, which is issued each November during Lung Cancer Awareness Month to help bring national focus and attention to the disease and gage progress in the fight against lung cancer. The 2011 National Report Card is distributed to leading public health and policy makers, media and elected officials.

(Nanowerk News) An investigation by a group of Thai researchers has demonstrated that Caveolin-1 (Cav-1) plays an important role in the migration and invasion of human lung cancer cells and that these effects are regulated by cellular reactive oxygen species (ROS). The group used transfected human lung cancer cells with Cav-1 plasmid which were incubated and cultured prior to performing migration assay.

“The result of this investigation shows the effect of ROS on cell migratory functions is dependent on Cav-1 expression and is associated with Akt activity” said Dr. Ubonthip Nimmannit of National Nanotechnology Center (NANOTEC). “The activation of Akt activity by Cav-1 helps to mediate cancer cell migration and is likely to play an important role in the ROS induced effect on cell motility alteration”.

The investigation reveals the differential role of individual ROS on cancer cell mortility and Cav-1 expression helps to better understand tumor progression and metastasis which is considered important in cancer research.

IOWA CITY – Researchers with UI Health Care have received a two-year, $340,023 grant from the National Cancer Institute to investigate whether a ketogenic diet can increase the effectiveness of radiation and chemotherapy for lung and pancreatic cancer.

Despite advances in chemotherapy and radiation, the prognosis for locally advanced nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and pancreatic cancer remain poor. The new study, led by UI researchers Douglas Spitz, Ph.D., John Buatti, M.D., Daniel Berg, M.D., and Sudershan Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D., aims to exploit a fundamental flaw in cancer cell metabolism to improve outcomes for patients with these cancers.

Relative to normal cells, cancer cells require more glucose to overcome a defect in their mitochondrial metabolism. The ketogenic diet, which is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, deprives cancer cells of glucose and forces them to rely on their flawed mitochondrial metabolism. This causes oxidative stress in the cancer cells and appears to make them more susceptible to chemotherapy and radiation.

From Medical News Today

Lung cancer patients with diabetes tend to live longer than patients without diabetes, according to a new study from Norway due to be published in the November issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. The researchers did not offer an explanation for the tendency; they suggested it needs further investigation, and diabetes should not be considered as a reason to withhold standard cancer therapy.

In their background information, the researchers, from Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Trondheim University, write that patients with lung cancer often have other diseases, one of them being diabetes. However, evidence on the impact of diabetes on lung cancer survival is conflicting, so they wanted to do a large study focusing on this.

From BMWi’s Global Innovation Series

“…Dweik’s research has shown that breathprints can be quite different between lung cancer patients. Dweik uses an “electronic nose” with 32 sensors — each sensor reacts differently to different compounds in your breath. “When you breathe over these sensors, they change in different ways and create a smellprint that is quite distinct between people who have cancer and people who do not, with 85% accuracy.” Of course, medicine isn’t perfect, and the drawback to the electronic nose is that Dweik’s team doesn’t yet know what compounds in breath give that smell signature — they could say if there is lung cancer or not, but can’t currently indicate why or which gas indicates cancer. Dweik admits that the smellprint shows proof of concept, but is lacking the link to the biology of the cancer. It’s a promising field, and smellprints and breathalyzer sensors will need to be used symbiotically to help doctors develop the technology even further. Breathprints should help doctors figure out what gases and compounds are indicative of what diseases, and then attune sensors to detect those compounds.

For now, the lung cancer smellprint is a big step. Lung cancer typically presents itself late — a patient might cough up blood, then have a biopsy done, but by that point, the cancer has advanced. Unlike breast cancer, which can be detected and treated early with annual mammograms, there isn’t a screening test for lung cancer, which means that this breath analysis technology could go a long way toward saving lives…”

Press release from the American Cancer Society

A new study finds that lung cancer patients treated in hospitals that care for a high percentage of uninsured and Medicaid-insured patients, so-called “high safety-net burden facilities,” were significantly less likely to undergo surgery that was intended to cure the cancer compared to patients treated at low safety-net burden facilities. This difference persisted even after controlling for other factors that significantly decreased the likelihood of curative-intent surgery, such as race, insurance status, stage, and female gender as well as other hospital characteristics.

Rob Densen from the Huffington Post, August 30, 2011

Our late refrigerator was a full-length side by side, with beveled wood panels on the doors which we got to match the cabinetry when we remodeled the kitchen. When it came to a replacement, I had relented on figuring out how to match the cabinets, but I was insistent on a side by side. My wife preferred the fridge-on-top-with-French-doors-freezer-on-the-bottom arrangement that is all the rage.

For the record, my preference for a side by side wasn’t just a matter of style. With a reconstructed knee, a frozen shoulder, and two bulging discs in my back wrapped around a giant lazy streak, I generally go out of my way to avoid any sort of bending motion. It’s not impossible, just a little uncomfortable.

In the week we dilly-dallied, the food was melting in the fridge — and my wife was on the way.

The next night I returned home and all was fine. “I ordered the top/down model. It will be here Thursday.”

She had been to her Pilates class earlier in the day and, in the midst of a long discussion with her instructor, it all became clear. “I realized,” she said, “that this will be my last refrigerator.”

A Life Measured in Kilowatt Hours

I couldn’t argue with her. Not with the logic and, most regrettably, not with the truthfulness of that statement. My wife has Stage IV lung cancer. Given the arc of the disease and the quality of refrigerator design and construction, it is highly probable that this will be her last refrigerator. The question is, are we also on our last washing machine, hairdryer or big screen TV?

FDA has given the regulatory nod to crizotinib, Pfizer’s ALK inhibitor that has proven very effective in the small portion of the population whose lung cancer is driven by the protein.

Pfizer says the drug, to be sold under the brand name Xalkori, will cost $9,600 per month, and it will provide assistance so that patient co-pays will not exceed $100. It’s the first in a handful of new drugs Pfizer is counting on to help offset the sales drain when the patent expires this fall on its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor.