Posts Tagged ‘Terra’

Health: Terra med Alliance News FDA Approved Leukemia Drugs Shows Promise In Ovarian Cancer Cells

Terra med Alliance News: The drug Sprycel, approved for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, significantly inhibited the growth and invasiveness of ovarian cancer cells and also promoted their death, a study by researchers with UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center found.

Terra med Alliance News: The drug, when paired with a chemotherapy regimen, was even more effective in fighting ovarian cancer in cell lines in which signaling of the Src family kinases, associated with the deadly disease, is activated.

The study appears in the Nov. 10, 2009 edition of the British Medical Journal.

Ovarian cancer, which will strike 21,600 women this year and kill 15,500, causes more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. Few effective therapies for ovarian cancer exist, so it would be advantageous for patients if a new drug could be found that fights the cancer, said Gottfried Konecny, an assistant professor of hematology/oncology, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and first author of the study.

“I think Sprycel could be a potential additional drug for treating patients with Src dependent ovarian cancer,” Konecny said. “It is important to remember that this work is only on cancer cell lines, but it is significant enough that it should be used to justify clinical trials to confirm that women with this type of ovarian cancer could benefit.”

Recent gene expression studies have shown that about one-third of women have ovarian cancers with activated Src pathways, so the drug could potentially help 7,000 ovarian cancer patients every year.

In this study, the UCLA team tested the drug against 34 ovarian cancer cell lines and they conducted genetic analysis on all cell lines. Through these analyses, the researchers were able to identify genes that predict response to Sprycel. If the work is confirmed in human studies, it may be possible to test patients for Src activation and select those who would respond prior to treatment, personalizing their care.

“We were able to identify markers in the pre-clinical setting that would allow us to predict response to Sprycel,” Konecny said. “These may help us in future clinical trials in selecting patients for studies of the drug.”

Sprycel is what is known as a “dirty” kinase inhibitor, meaning it inhibits more than one pathway. Konecny said it also inhibits the focal adhesion kinase and ephrin receptor, also associated with ovarian cancer.

The next step, Konecny said, would be to test the drug on women with ovarian cancer in a clinical trial. The tissue of responders would then be analyzed to determine if the Src and other pathways were activated. If that is confirmed, it would further prove that Sprycel could be used to fight ovarian cancer. In studies, women would be screened before entering a trial and only those with Src dependent cancers could be enrolled to provide further evidence, Konecny said, much like the studies of the molecularly targeted breast cancer drug Herceptin enrolled only women who had HER-2 positive disease.

“Herceptin is different because we knew in advance that the only worked in women with HER-2 amplification,” he said. “In this case, we don’t clearly know that yet. The data reassure us that the drug works where the targets are over-expressed but we need more testing to confirm this.”

The tests combining the drug with chemotherapy are significant because chemotherapy currently is the first line treatment for ovarian cancer patients following surgery. Because Sprycel proved to have a synergistic effect when combined with chemotherapy — both made the other work better — it may be possible to add the targeted therapy as a first line treatment if its efficacy is confirmed in future studies, adding a new tool to an oncologist’s arsenal. Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Los Angeles, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Terra med Alliance is a non-profit organization in the battle against leukemia  helps  children living with cancer and their families. Our goal is to make sure children battling cancer know they are not alone. For more information please visit www.terramedalliance.org.  Email at contact@terramedalliance.org

Terra med Alliance News US anger at new age rules for breast cancer tests

Terra med Alliance News Doctors and experts are in uproar over new recommendations to raise the age of breast cancer screening, warning more women will die from the disease which already claims some 40,000 lives each year.

Terra med Alliance News : Doctors and experts are in uproar over new recommendations to raise the age of breast cancer screening, warning more women will die from the disease which already claims some 40,000 lives each year.

The high-level United States Preventative Services Task Force of scientists and researchers Monday recommended that breast cancer screening in women should now start at the age of 50 as opposed to 40.

And it further said that women between the ages of 50 to 74 should be screened every two years instead of annually.

“Screening saves lives, and cutting back on screening would cost lives,” said Dr. Timothy Johnson, an oncologist at Holyoke Medical Center in Massachusetts.

“I’m against the proposals to cut back the screening on women between the age of 40 and 50, absolutely,” he told AFP.

Some 210,000 American women are affected by the disease each year, and breast tumors are the most common cancer in women patients at Holyoke.

The task force’s findings came two years after the panel issued a report which looked at the same issue, but did not recommend raising the screening age.

Some wondered whether the recommendations issued Monday were part of a cost-cutting effort as the United States wrestles to reform its health care system, something it wasn’t doing two years ago.

Terra med Alliance News: But if that was the idea, cutting mammograms for younger women was not the way to go, said Dr Christine Pellegrino of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Cancer Care in New York.

“Are they going to not reimburse mammograms for younger women versus potentially having to absorb the case of a woman who presents years later with advanced breast cancer where you’re talking chemotherapy, surgery, more chemo, radiation and a great potential for recurrence?” Pellegrino, who is director of Montefiore-Einstein’s breast clinic, wondered.

“Not only does that have a huge financial cost but also a devastating psychological impact,” said Pellegrino, who was also opposed to hiking the starting age for breast cancer screening.

“If a woman shows up at 50 for her first screening and they find out she has this big cancer, and you know that if you had screened her a few years earlier you would have found it… whether you’re the patient or the provider, if you have to say, ‘Well, if we had done this two years earlier,’ nobody will recover from that.”

Mammograms currently cost the US public health system, Medicare, between three and five billion dollars a year.

One reason the task force gave for phasing out mammograms for younger women was the higher incidence of false-positive results in the group. These caused significant stress and led to unnecessary biopsies and treatment.

But cancer survivor Debbie Guardian said a false-positive was a small price to pay for catching the real thing in time.

“What’s worse? A lot of stress only to find out it was plain old calcification or a lot of stress to discover you’ve got breast cancer but it’s treatable because you were screened on time?” Guardian, whose doctors confirmed she had breast cancer days after her 50th birthday last year, told AFP.

“I went every single year (for a mammogram) starting at 40. Had I not gone when I was still 49, I wouldn’t have known I had cancer because it wasn’t big enough for me to feel, but it was big enough to be serious,” she said.

“What this esteemed panel of experts is recommending is not wise, to put it politely. Based on personal experience, I wholeheartedly disagree with them,” she said.

Pellegrino said the panel’s recommendations went against years of efforts to raise awareness of breast cancer.

“To start telling women, ‘I know you just turned 40 but we’re not going to do your baseline mammogram’ — the reaction is going to be one of complete visceral disbelief like, ‘What do you mean I’m not going to have my mammogram’?”

According to this year’s report, one life is saved for every 1,900 women aged 40-49 screened for breast cancer, compared to one life for every 1,300 in the 50-59 year age group.

“You may have to screen 1,900 women a year to save one life, but that’s part of cancer screening,” said Johnson. “We see a lot of women in their 40s with breast cancer, and by screening younger women, we save lives.”

Terra med Alliance is a non-profit charity organization dedicated to research, education and advocacy of breast cancer. One of the vision of Terramed Alliance is to provide this community and Internet users with a charity based research and education entity. Advocacy of breast cancer through education is vital to the reduction of this disease.  For any requests and enquiries, please contact at us: cancer@terramedalliance.us www.terramedalliance.us