LungBlog

For J.K. Grant, participating in a test of a potential lung cancer vaccine is, as she puts it, her “civic duty.”

Grant was diagnosed with lung cancer last year, which resulted in surgery to remove tumors and parts of her right lung.

Shortly after, her physician asked if she would be willing to participate in a study testing whether a new vaccine is effective in preventing a recurrence of the most common type of lung cancer.

Grant didn’t hesitate. “No, not a bit,” said Grant, 65, of Everett. “It might help someone else.”

The vaccine is being tested at Providence Regional Cancer Partnership, one of 141 sites nationally and 400 sites across the world working on the study. A total of 2,270 patients are expected to participate.

Riverain Medical® announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted approval for the newest version of the OnGuard™ Chest X-ray Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) technology. OnGuard identifies solitary pulmonary nodules that may represent early-stage lung cancer on an existing chest X-ray (1). This improved performance demonstrates a 73% reduction in false positive marks and 50% higher relative sensitivity compared to the original product (2).

More than 200,000 Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer this year. Only a small percentage of these patients will be diagnosed with lung cancer in the earliest stages when it is most treatable. When lung cancer is detected early, five-year survival rates triple (3). Multiple studies demonstrate that OnGuard can detect 37-50% of lung cancers that were missed in the initial interpretation (4),(5).

Merck Serono, a division of Merck KGaA, and its U.S. affiliate, EMD Serono, Inc. announced that they are resuming their Stimuvax® (BLP25 liposome vaccine)* clinical program in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) which includes the Phase III studies, STARTa and INSPIREb. The treatment and enrollment in these studies will restart after approval by the local regulatory authorities and ethics committees.

“Merck Serono remains highly committed to the development of BLP25 liposome vaccine and the well-being of the patients. We believe this therapeutic cancer vaccine has the potential to be a valuable addition to the future range of therapies for oncologists and their patients,” said Dr. Wolfgang Wein, Executive Vice President, Oncology, Merck Serono.

This announcement follows a decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to partially lift the clinical hold it placed on the Investigational New Drug (IND) application for BLP25 liposome vaccine in March 2010 and allow the START trial to be resumed.

Germany’s Merck KGaA (MRCG.DE) and its U.S. partner Oncothyreon (ONTY.O) have resumed testing their experimental cancer vaccine Stimuvax on lung-cancer patients, reviving hopes for a key pipeline drug.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lifted the hold it had placed on a Phase III trial called START in non-small cell lung cancer, Merck said on Thursday.

Merck and Oncothyreon also continued their INSPIRE study, which targets Asian lung-cancer patients, but the Phase III STRIDE trial in breast cancer remained suspended, it added.

Merck on March 23 stopped all tests of the vaccine on humans after a patient contracted encephalitis in another setback at the drugs unit from which Merck is trying to diversify.

While it may be a bit early to start popping supplements, a new study finds that people with high levels of vitamin B6 may be less likely to develop lung cancer than those with low concentrations. Reporting in the June 16 Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers also note a seemingly protective effect from high levels of the essential amino acid methionine and a weaker healthful effect from high levels of folate, another B vitamin.

It’s not yet established how high amounts of these compounds might protect the body from lung cancer, but all three are involved in the maintenance of DNA. In the vast majority of lung cancer cases, toxic smoke causes the DNA damage and aberrant cell growth that marks the disease.

Having higher blood levels of vitamin B6 and the amino acid methionine both appear to reduce lung cancer risk in smokers and nonsmokers alike, according to a new study.

“We found that vitamin B6 and methionine are strongly associated with reducing lung cancer risk in people who never smoked, those who quit, and current smokers,” researcher Paul Brennan, PhD, of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, tells WebMD.

Whether the link is cause and effect, he says, is not known.

In the U.S. alone, more than 219,000 new cases of lung cancer were expected in 2009, according to the American Cancer Society, with about 160,000 deaths.

Bayer HealthCare and Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Monday their cancer treatment Nexavar failed to boost survival in a clinical study involving patients with a certain type of advanced lung cancer.

Nexavar, which is on the market as a treatment for liver cancer and kidney cancer, did not meet its main goal of improving suvival in the late-stage trial. The study compared Nexavar and standard treatments against standard treatments and a placebo. The patients had a type of lung cancer called non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer.

Onyx and Bayer said patients treated with Nexavar did live longer before their cancer began to progress again, however. The companies say they will review data from the study to determine if the results affect their views on future trials.

A new study uses a sophisticated genomic analysis to unravel some of the complex cellular signals that drive the deadly invasive spread of lung cancer. The research, published by Cell Press in the June issue of the journal Cancer Cell, identifies specific molecules involved in the often fatal metastasis of a common type of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and uses this information to design effective therapeutic strategies.

“Previous cancer genomics studies have established a number of oncogene and tumor suppressor pathways as important for the initiation and maintenance of NSCLC,” explains senior study author, Dr. Kwok-Kin Wong from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “However, the molecular alterations necessary for invasion and metastases of NSCLC are less well-defined. Because metastasis causes much of the morbidity and incurability of cancer, there is an urgent need to elucidate the events underlying this biological process.

Just how bad is lung cancer prognosis? Is lung cancer life expectancy always poor? Lung cancer remains the foremost cause of cancer death in the world and has beaten heart disease to first place as a smoking-related killer disease. Read on to learn what factors influence lung cancer prognosis, why lung cancer life expectancy is poor and if lung cancer survival rate can be improved.

Lung Cancer Prognosis – What Factors Determine Lung Cancer Survival Rate

The first thing to know about lung cancer is that there are two types – the more common non-small cell lung cancer and the more deadly small cell or oat cell lung cancer. The factors determining lung cancer prognosis are:

A class of medications that have been used to lower blood pressure and treat heart failure may have a downside. They may raise the risk of developing lung cancer.

Researchers looked at over 60,000 people treated with a class of blood pressure medications called angiotensin-receptor blockers – known as “ARBs” in the medical community. They found that the use of these medications was associated with an approximately 1% increased risk of developing cancer. This means that if 100 people used ARBs for 4 years, one of them may be expected to develop cancer. When looking at lung cancer in particular, the risk appeared to be 25% higher.

Before pushing the panic button, it helps to look a bit at statistics. What this 25% increase meant is that instead of the average risk of developing lung cancer – 6%, the group of people using ARBs had a risk of 7.2%. In addition, the risk of death from cancer wasn’t significantly higher.