Treating tumors with salmonella bacteria can induce an immune response that kills cancer cells, scientists have found — a discovery that may help them create tumor-killing immune cells to inject into patients.

Researchers from Italy and the United States who worked with mouse and human cancer cells in laboratories said their work might help in developing a new drug in a class of cancer treatments called immunotherapies or therapeutic vaccines, which harness the body’s immune system to fight disease.

“We did experiments first in mice and then in cancer cells and immune cells from human patients, and found that the salmonella was doing exactly the same job,” Maria Rescigno of European Institute of Oncology in Milan, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. “Now we are ready to go into (testing on) humans, but we are waiting for authorization.”

The scientists said they thought the salmonella bacteria, which they used in a safe form that did not cause illness itself, helped to flag up cancer cells to the body’s immune system, which was then able to find and kill them.

In the very earliest stages of cancer, patrolling immune cells often recognize cancer cells as abnormal and destroy them, they explained in their study, which was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday (more…)

The Cancer Society fears the effect on cancer sufferers if Dunedin loses neurosurgery.

Chief executive Mike Kernaghan and board member Dr Blair McLaren, a medical oncologist, outlined their concerns for cancer patients and their families if the South Island’s neurosurgeons are all based in Christchurch.

Dr McLaren, clinical leader of oncology for the Southern Blood and Cancer Service, warned the prospective change may also put at risk a long-standing national cancer contract for radiosurgery, which had neurosurgery input.

Dunedin Hospital was the only provider of radiosurgery in New Zealand.

Dr McLaren was concerned about the effect on sufferers – and their families – if they had to be transferred to Christchurch.

“It’s about disrupting a family at a critical phase of their life.”

He believed the situation was governed by “political” motivations, rather than clinical.

The focus must be on the patients.

When Southland and Otago oncology services were merged in 2008, delivering treatment close to patients’ homes was made a priority.

Centralising administration of a service did not mean centralising treatment, he said.

Some treatments, including radiotherapy, were only available in Dunedin. (more…)

On the average, one child is diagnosed with cancer in the state each week.

The actual figure is most probably higher because the ‘one per week’ statistics is merely based on records kept by the Sarawak General Hospital (SGH) and the Sarawak Children’s Cancer Society (SCCS).

SCCS vice-president Wong Kok Ping told The Borneo Post at SCCS’s 9th Charity Food Fair here yesterday that on the average, SGH and SCCS records showed a total of more than 50 cases.

“This does not include patients admitted to the private hospitals,” he pointed out.

For the first seven months of this year, 32 children had been diagnosed with various types of cancer. (more…)

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

What are you doing to make a difference?

Are you walking in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure in Philadelphia, hosting a special event or offering a free health screening?

Or are you a breast cancer survivor willing to share the story of your journey?

Tell us about it.

Send information to dmarko@thedailyjournal.com by 5 p.m. Aug. 27 or call Deborah M. Marko at (856) 563-5256.

via:Breast cancer

Surgery for localized prostate cancer offers a significantly higher survival rate than either external-beam radiation or hormonal therapies, according to a new study led by researchers at UCSF.

The differences among therapies were more prominent at higher levels of cancer risk, and suggest, the researchers say, that in many cases surgery should play a greater role in treatment strategies for patients with prostate cancer that is likely to recur or spread.

The study is available online in the journal Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society.

Most previous reports comparing treatment outcomes among different treatment options have looked only at PSA responses to treatment, rather than at the more important long-term survival outcomes, according to the researchers. Measuring levels of PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, in the blood, is intended to help determine whether prostate cancer has recurred or spread, although in many cases a rising PSA level does not necessarily mean the cancer will progress.

Roughly one man in six will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men, according to the American Cancer Society. (more…)

Several Northward Bay mortal patients instrument person to travelling to City for follow-up assessments after monthly clinics held here for decades were cut.

Sean Barrette, people relations serviceman for the City Regional Hospital, said the “skirting” clinics in cities such as Northwestern Bay and Timmins ended June 1 because there are not sufficiency medical oncologists – a person health-care write.

“Fundamentally, in arrangement for waiting nowadays to be restored and to avoid oncologist burnout, there had to be changes for follow-up want,” Barrette said.

“Volumes of cancer patients are always increasing,” he said, adding the regional centre has been functioning for a couple of years without a full complement of specialists. “It starts to eventually wear on those who are there.”

There were 285 patient visits at the clinics held twice a month in 2009, but Barrette said not all cancer outpatients will be forced to drive to Sudbury for their check ups every six or 12 months.

He said radiology oncologists will still hold clinics in North Bay when appropriate.

“Nobody likes to see any type of reduction in services, but this will ultimately benefit cancer patients. Acute treatment patients will be seen quicker,” he said.

Tiziana Silveri, vice president of surgery and maternal child at North Bay and District Hospital, said teleconferencing will also be an option for some outpatients, noting the quality of the technology has improved greatly.

And Silveri said the chemotherapy clinics providing active treatment are still being held in North Bay.

“There’s no change in that,” she said…….. (more…)

Thanks to 1.5 million volunteers who leftist their computers locomotion when not in use and a soft ply from Big Depressed, somebody researchers hump announced significant movement in search for new possible drugs in house discourse.

The Exploit Conquer Constellation Send worked with the IBM-supported Humanity Territory Grid to publicise out catalyst samples for technique investigating on all of the computers. The software, squirting in the stress of the volunteers’ computers and harnessing unused compute cycles, simulated a deliver titled rock, where proteins illuminate into a massive forge.

In this form, the proteins can be further examined by special X-ray to see how they interact with cancer, and whether or not those proteins may cause the disease.

Using the World Community Grid to send out sample after sample to the volunteers, the Help Conquer Cancer Project believes it was able to determine six times as many images per protein for further testing in significantly less time than would be possible under manual human review.

By way of example, if a person looked at one image per second without rest — which is not humanly possible — it would take 1,333 days to examine all 12,500 proteins in the study. The World Community Grid did that in a fraction of the time, said Dr. Joseph Jasinski, an IBM distinguished engineer and program director of IBM’s Health Care and Life Sciences Institute……… (more…)

www.nucleusinc.com This 3D medical animation on prostate cancer surgery shows the laparascopic removal of a cancerous prostate gland and its surrounding tissues. A prostatectomy is a surgery to remove an enlarged prostate gland due to benign prostatic hyperplasia or prostate cancer. Simple or radical prostatectomy can be done using open or laparoscopic techniques. ANCE00192

(Asian News International Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Washington, April 22 (ANI): The debate on whether cell phones cause cancer is still going on, with some groups saying that a safety-warning label should be put on them the way they are put on cigarettes and alcohol.

A bill in the Maine state senate had recently proposed a label warning users, especially children and pregnant women, of the risks of brain cancer from electromagnetic radiation emanating from the device.

But the Maine legislature voted down the bill in March, stating that the scientific evidence does not indicate a public health risk.

Supporters of the Maine legislation argued that uncertainty about the long-term effects of cell phone radiation warranted public safety notices.

They also pointed to a handful of European studies that linked brain and auditory nerve tumours with using cell phones for more than 10 years and at younger ages.

David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment at the University of Albany, and an advocate for the Maine bill on cell phone warnings says that there is a chance the device can cause cancer.

“I think my short answer is that the evidence isn’t 100 percent, but there’s a strong indication that, yes, cell phone use does cause cancer (over a long period of time),” Discovery News quoted him as saying.

Carpenter points to a 2007 meta-analysis that associated ipsilateral auditory nerve tumours (acoustic neuromas) with people who had used cell phones for at least 10 years, as well as a 2009 Swedish study that found a heightened risk for brain tumours among people who had used cell phones for at least 10 years, especially for those under 20 years old.

Not surprisingly, cell phone industry insiders disagree.

“The peer-reviewed scientific evidence has overwhelmingly indicated that wireless devices, within the (radiation) limits established by the FCC, do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects,” said John Walls, vice president of public affairs for CTIA — The Wireless Association, an international trade group that represents the wireless telecomm industry.

For instance, 2001 Danish study and 2006 follow-up found no relationship between cancer risk and long-term cell phone use among more than 400,000 users…. (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…)