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If you smoke, you know you’re putting yourself at increased risk of lung cancer. But if you boost the variety of fruits and vegetables that you eat, you may be able to lower those odds a bit. (more…)
The hospital said the operation was performed last month on a man in his 60s from Hiroshima Prefecture who was suffering from advanced cancer in the right lung and other parts. It decided to perform the autotransplantation operation because it would not cause rejection or breathing problems from simply removing the lung.
In the operation, a conservation solution for transplantation was injected into the extracted right lung and cancer was removed after a cooling treatment was applied to last for eight hours. The lung was put back into the body after no cancer was confirmed in the lung. The patient recovered his vital capacity up to about 70% and can play golf and do other exercise, according to the hospital……. (more…)
Have you ever wondered why some chain smokers are lucky enough to get away without certain side effects, like lung cancer? While there are other poor souls just might get lung cancer without ever having smoked a single cigarette in their whole lives?
The truth is, smoking will merely increase your chances of getting lung cancer. But that doesn’t mean that smoking cigarettes is a 100 percent guaranteed way of contracting cancer. So what are the factors that trigger lung cancer, in addition to smoking? Or is there no correlation between the two?
Lung cancer is a disease that kills more than a million people annually. It is also the most common form of cancer, that is, more people will die from lung cancer than from any other type of cancer. Statistics tell us that 90 percent of lung cancer cases occur in smokers, that is to say, only 1 in 10 non-smokers are affected by lung cancer. But the real question to ask is: how many smokers are ultimately diagnosed with lung cancer?….. (more…)
There’s a enthusiastic and hairy back to titty cancer. Not the disease itself, which is life-disruptive at its foremost and deathly at its bad. But there are celebratory races with survivors path the completion product, accumulation lifted in crow; press covers conformation celebrities who bang survived the disease; and sound ribbons seemingly everyplace.
Other cancers receive less attention. These cancers may not have a warm and fuzzy side, but we agree that people diagnosed with them deserve our support and kindness.
But one cancer is noteworthy for the lack of empathy and compassion it elicits.
“Lung cancer is the ugly stepsister of cancer,” was how one person described it to me.
When she was diagnosed, most people assumed that she smoked. She didn’t. (Some 10 to 15 percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer are nonsmokers. For reasons not fully understood, lung cancer is more common in nonsmoking women than in nonsmoking men).
Even her friends who knew she didn’t smoke interrogated her to find the cause. There was an underlying sense that if she wasn’t at fault, someone or something else was.
Blame seems to be the unspoken word when lung cancer is discussed.
People with other cancers aren’t blamed. We don’t accuse them or even wonder if they did something to cause their cancers. The cancer just is.
Anyone who has had cancer can tell you how difficult it was to get the diagnosis and then to share that news with family and friends. Imagine how much more difficult it would be if you sensed people thinking — or even saying, “Well, that’s what you get for smoking.”…….. (more…)
Rosetta Genomics, Ltd. (NASDAQ: ROSG), a leading developer and provider of microRNA-based molecular diagnostic tests, announces the publication of a study showing microRNA expression differentiates between primary lung tumors and metastases to the lung. The study, entitled, “MicroRNA expression differentiates between primary lung tumors and metastases to the lung,” was published in the online edition of Pathology Research and Practice on April 28, 2010. The article is available at the following URL: see here.
Differentiating whether a pulmonary neoplasm is primary or metastatic can be challenging for surgical pathologists, and is an important distinction for clinicians in determining the proper treatment protocols. Current biomarkers do not always aid lung tumor classification. The study’s authors identified a set of microRNAs that is expressed differentially between these two groups using microRNA microarray data generated from 76 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples of either primary lung cancer or metastatic tumors to the lung.
According to the study, “The tissue-associated expression of microRNA likely explains the remarkable finding that many tumors can be classified based solely on their microRNA expression signature. Here we show that microRNAs can serve as biomarkers for lung tumor classification.”
“These data offer further evidence of the flexibility and potential wide range of clinical applicability of our microRNA technology. The growing body of literature, as well as our commercial line of miRview™ tests, continue to demonstrate that microRNAs are highly reliable and powerful biomarkers for a wide range of indications,” noted Kenneth A. Berlin, President and CEO of Rosetta Genomics. … (more…)
24. April 2010 08:49
The first lung cancer clinical trial to guide targeted therapies to patients based on molecular signatures in tumor biopsies is a step toward personalized care and more effective, efficient clinical trials for new drugs, study leaders reported today during the American Association for Cancer Research 101st Annual Meeting 2010.
Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center presented the results of the study that used an innovative statistical model to match four drugs to specific molecular signatures, or biomarkers, in the tumors of 255 stage IV non-small cell lung cancer patients who had received between one and nine previous treatments.
“New drugs that target molecular pathways help a small percentage of lung cancer patients, but right now there’s no way to determine who those patients are before treatment,” said Edward Kim, M.D., associate professor in M. D. Anderson’s Department of Thoracic/Head and Neck Medical Oncology and principal investigator on the Biomarker-Integrated Approaches of Targeted Therapy for Lung Cancer Elimination (BATTLE) clinical trials.
“BATTLE evaluated tumor biomarkers in hopes that we can treat lung cancer, which kills more people than any other type of cancer, like we treat breast or colon cancer, using validated biomarkers to guide treatment and improve survival,” Kim said. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 219,440 new cases of lung cancer were diagnosed in 2009 and 159,390 people died from the disease.
Kim said BATTLE also points the way to more precise clinical trials that will require smaller numbers of patients to test a targeted therapy rather than large trials open to all-comers. “Lung cancer research has been plagued by large, Phase III clinical trials that showed minor effects or even failed to enroll enough patients to finish,” Kim said.
“Two lung cancer tumors might appear identical under a microscope and have the same staging, but they behave differently,” said Waun Ki Hong, M.D., head of M.D. Anderson’s Division of Cancer Medicine and principal investigator on the BATTLE grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. “The name of the game now is to treat based on the molecular defects in the tumor.”
The Phase II clinical trial found evidence that each of the four drugs targets specific molecular signatures better than the other three. The drugs used in the trial were erlotinib (Tarceva-), sorafenib (Nexavar-), vandetanib (Zactima-) and erlotinib with bexarotene (Targretin-). Each drug is designed to target specific molecular pathways; currently, none has a validated biomarker to guide its use…. (more…)
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Testing lung cancer patients for tumor markers would enable doctors to choose which drug the patient is most likely to respond to, improving the chances for successful treatment, according to results from a recent trial.
The mid-stage study, conducted at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and funded by the U.S. Army, enrolled 255 patients with advanced lung cancer who had previously been treated with chemotherapy.
“We are still in the dark ages with how we treat lung cancer patients,” said Dr. Edwin Kim, associate professor at the center’s thoracic/head and neck oncology department and the study’s lead investigator. Currently, they are separated only into “histologic” categories such as small cell or non-small cell lung cancer, with subtypes like squamous or non-squamous.
“As far as molecular testing nothing is standardly done in lung cancer at this time,” Kim said.
For other types of cancer — such as breast and colon — such testing has become common in recent years amid the development of biologic drugs designed to work only against tumors with specific genetic or molecular characteristics.
Patients in the MD Anderson trial had their lung tumors biopsied and tested for several “biomarkers” including epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR; vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF; a gene known as KRAS; and another that encodes for a protein called Cyclin D1.
Erlotinib, sold by Roche Holding AG and OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc under the brand name Tarceva, is designed to block EGFR, a protein found in high amounts on many types of cancer cells…. (more…)
A research team at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has shown in a study that two closely related enzymes could be targets for the treatment of lung cancer. The discovery was made when the researchers blocked the production of the two enzymes in transgenic mice. This resulted in inhibition of cell growth, fewer tumours and greater survival among the mice. The article is being published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). With many types of cancer, the growth and spread of tumours is stimulated by Ras and Rho proteins. For these proteins to function, they need to be modified by the closely related enzymes FT and GGT. A number of pharmaceutical companies have therefore developed substances that reduce the activity of these two enzymes with the aim of inhibiting the function of Ras and Rho proteins and so slowing the development of the disease.
However, treatment with various substances to block these two enzymes has often been non-specific, and their efficacy has varied widely. This has made it difficult for researchers to assess the true potential of these enzymes as targets for medicines.
“We therefore developed genetic strategies in mice, known as transgenic mice, to switch off the genes coding for FT and GGT, enabling us to investigate whether a complete blockade of FT or GGT can inhibit the development of lung cancer, and whether this has side-effects in the lungs,” explains researcher Anna-Karin Sjögren, who led the study together with Meng Liu, both from the Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine.
In their study, the researchers used transgenic mice which produce a mutated Ras protein that causes lung cancer. First, production of FT or GGT in these mice’s lungs was stopped by switching off the relevant genes… (more…)
