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……..

Barbara Spencer, manager of the North Bay branch of the Canadian Cancer Society, said she is not sure how much more pressure will be put on the travel program which assists people attending appointments.

“Certainly, it was much easier when we had oncologists who were travelling here and it will mean an increase in the travel program, we’ll probably know more in three months,” she said.

The travel program usually costs close to $200,000 a year to run using volunteer drivers, who numbered 73 last year. Spencer said 675 adults and children were transported in 2009 to appointments at hospitals in southern and eastern Ontario, as well as Sudbury, with 3,140 trips overall.

“This year, it will be probably be up,” she said.

ddale@nugget.ca

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………

“The World Community Grid is really good at running embarrassingly parallel computation, where you do the same task over and over again. So it’s set up for doing many possibilities to try where you want to throw away the ones that are no good quickly,” Jasinski told InternetNews.com.

Something like testing for cancer drugs works with a setup like the World Community Grid. The 1.5 million machines work independently and don’t communicate with each, hence Jasinski’s description of them as “embarrassingly parallel.” They perform the same repetitive task over and over — in this case, testing a protein to see its potential in cancer treatment.

An increasing number of firms are turning to this solution for their own large-scale computing tasks, but they are keeping the process inside the firewall. Distributed computing lends itself well to a “loosely coupled” task like searching through a vast amount of data for a match, Jasinski said

In a “tightly coupled” scenario, where the program might need the results of one step in order to continue, or processors need to communicate, a company would be better off using IBM’s BlueGene servers, where high-speed interconnects enable interprocessor communication, Jasinski said.

IBM consulting helps firms determine whether their computation needs are loosely coupled or tightly coupled, and offers the appropriate solution. Some companies are using loosely coupled computing internally, Jasinski said.

IBM has its own technology and services through its Smarter Planet initiative to help these firms build internal distributed computing systems. Companies like financial, life science and drug research firms put an agent on employee computers and request they leave their computer running at the end of the day, he said.

“We have helped companies and institutions set these things up. It’s part of a growing trend around distributed computing, a sort of precursor to cloud computing in a sense, so I think that general trend of trying to harness the horsepower you have and get as much productivity from the infrastructure you have is going to continue,” Jasinski said.

“We have a good and growing list of problems people are applying this technology toward, typically in energy, the environment, health care and life sciences. We’ve also tried to get some stuff going in computational aspects of humanities research,” he added.

The World Community Grid launched in 2004 and is the world’s largest public scientific research computer network, with 514,000 members offering 1.5 million devices, meaning many people are running more than just their own personal computer.

It runs other tests similar to the Help Conquer Cancer Project, like FightAIDS@home, which looks for a cure for HIV, plus programs to fight influenza, muscular dystrophy, human protein folding and research efforts in the field of clean energy.

via:cancer

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

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….

In addition, a statistical review from the National Institutes of Cancer revealed no rise in cancer incidence rates from 1975 to 2005 in relation to the rise in cell phone usage.

Joshua Muscat, a public health science professor at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the cancer-causing potential of cell phone radiation, also questions the connection.

“There is no known mechanism by which radio frequency fields generated by cell phones can cause cancer,” Muscat said.

Cell phone radiation is non-ionising, which means it isn’t high frequency enough to strip electrons from atoms and molecules and directly damage cellular DNA, like x rays can.

Nevertheless, when you press a cell phone against your ear while it’s in use, head and brain tissues can absorb that vibrating, low-frequency radiation and heat.

Because of that radiation effect, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sets specific absorption rates (SARs) that dictate the maximum amount of radiation cell phones and mobile devices can give off.

“The power output from these phones is extremely low,” Muscat said.

However, Carpenter counters that the SARs don’t take into account the potential long-term damage of close-range exposure to heat-inducing radiation, especially in children.

“Those (FCC) levels are set by engineers and physicists, and those aren’t the people who should be setting health-based standards,” he said.

Carpenter thinks that the results from a large, 13-country study called Interphone, which consists of a series of 16 case-controlled studies conducted between 2000 and 2005, could finally settle the debate.

Each of the Interphone studies recruited at least 100 people who had developed brain cancer or certain types of tumours, along with a healthy control group.

But it’s been hampered by methodological shortcomings. In many cases, the group was asked to describe their cell phone habits, which critics contend led to recall bias. So far, it still hasn’t rendered a final verdict.

For now, the National Cancer Institute, American Cancer Society, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, among other leading health agencies and organizations, aren’t ringing the alarm bells.

For one thing, scientists have yet to pinpoint how the low-frequency cell phone radiation could cause cancer.

“(Cell phone radiation’s) effect in the body appears to be insufficient to produce the genetic damage typically associated with developing cancer,” said Robert N. Hoover, director of epidemiology for the National Cancer Institute, in an official statement to Congress.

“To date, no alternative mechanism about how this exposure might result in cancer has been vetted adequately,” he said.

Until scientists can unmask that “mechanism,” Carpenter urges consumers to play it safe and text message or hold cell phones away from their ears to limit radiation exposure.

Even Muscat from Penn State leaves a space, albeit a narrow one, for caution.

“It is a legitimate concern in the sense that there may be some unknown, undiscovered mechanism that could be promoting the development of cancer,” Muscat said.

“This seems unlikely, but if one looks at other scientific disciplines such as cosmology or particle physics, there are often paradigm shifts that occur with new discoveries,” he added. (ANI) (c) 2009 Asian News International (ANI) – All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company

Via:tmcnet.com

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….

Tarceva is cleared for treating lung cancer that has gotten worse following at least one chemo regimen and the companies’ are seeking approval for its use in patients whose disease has remained stable after chemotherapy.

The M.D. Anderson trial also looked at treatment with AstraZeneca PLC’s Zactima, or vandetanib, which has targets including VEGF, a protein tumors need to grow vessels to supply blood. AstraZeneca last year pulled its regulatory applications for Zactima in lung cancer after an updated analysis found no overall survival advantage when the drug was added to chemotherapy.

Other drugs in the study were Nexavar, or sorafenib, sold by Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc and Bayer AG, for treatment of kidney and liver cancers, and bexarotene, sold under the brand name Targretin as a treatment for a type of lymphoma.

The trial’s end point was disease control at eight weeks, which is seen as an indicator of overall survival. “In our study, if you made it to eight weeks, survival was 11.5 months. if not, it was 7.5 months,” Kim said, noting that as patients were enrolled they were directed to regimens which proved successful for earlier patients with similar tumor types.

The study found that 61 percent of patients with a KRAS mutation in their tumors who took Nexavar had no tumor growth at eight weeks, compared with 32 percent for the other three drugs.

Tarceva did best against EGFR mutations, Zactima for high VEGF expression and the Tarceva-Targretin fared best with Cyclin D1 defects or amplified numbers of the EGFR gene, the researchers said.

Overall, 46 percent of patients on the trial had disease control at 8 weeks, compared with a historical experience of around 30 percent for late-stage lung cancer patients.

Researchers said toxicities from the four drugs were minimal, with 6.5 percent of patients having a significant side effect.

Kim said future trials are needed to test combinations of therapies as well as single agents, including trials in earlier-stage lung cancer patients.

Roche is conducting a late-stage trial looking at the effectiveness of Tarceva as a first-line treatment for lung cancer patients with EGFR mutations.

Results were to be presented in Washington on Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

(Reporting by Deena Beasley; editing by Carol Bishopric)

The research by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), published online in the journal Cancer Cell, used epigenomics to determine that tumor DNA methylation profiles were distinctly different in about 10 percent of patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

“Most GBM patients survive fewer than 15 months, and fewer than 10 percent live more than five years,” said Peter W. Laird of the USC Epigenome Center, who led the TCGA team in collaboration with Dr. Kenneth Aldape at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Stephen B. Baylin at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and many other TCGA consortium members. “With this research, we have identified a subset of patients with a distinct type of GBM that have substantially better clinical outcomes, with a median survival time of more than three years from the time of diagnosis.”

Epigenomics is the study of how DNA is packaged and marked to control which genes can be used in a particular type of cell or tissue. The distribution of one of these marks along the DNA, called DNA methylation, is often abnormal in cancer, contributing to the disease process. The characteristic epigenetic profile discovered by the TCGA team is called G-CIMP (Glioma CpG Island Methylator Phenotype) and was found to occur in much younger patients. G-CIMP tumors have other distinct alterations in their genomic landscape, revealing an interesting association with an acquired mutation in the IDH1 gene.

“Such findings are critical to the detection and treatment of brain cancer based on the genetic or epigenetic profile of each patient’s disease,” said National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “The depth and breadth of expertise in The Cancer Genome Atlas research network, combined with ever-improving genomic technologies, is generating remarkably detailed insights into cancer.”

Noushmehr H., et al., Identification of a CpG Island Methylator Phenotype that Defines a Distinct Subgroup of Glioma, Cancer Cell (2010), doi:10.1016/j.ccr.2010.03.017

Source:

Leslie Ridgeway

University of Southern California

via:medicalnewstoday.com/

With the release of the study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, a team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, led by Michael Weiss, MD, PhD, Cowan-Blum Professor of Cancer Research and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry, reveals their invention of a “smart” insulin protein molecule that binds considerably less to cancer receptors and self-assembles under the skin. To provide a slow-release form of insulin, t he analog self-assembles under the skin by means of “stapling” itself via bridging zinc ions. In light of its scientific and societal importance, the publication was highlighted as a “Paper of the Week” by the editors of the journal.

“It’s quite a novel mechanism. Our team has applied the perspective of biomedical engineering to the biochemistry of a therapeutic protein. We regard the injected insulin solution as forming a new biomaterial that can be engineered to optimize its nano-scale properties,” says Dr. Weiss. He adds, “The notion of engineered zinc staples may find application to improve diverse injectable protein drugs to address a variety of conditions from cancer to immune deficiency.”

While initially tested in diabetic rats by team member Faramarz Ismail-Beigi, PhD, professor of medicine at CWRU School of Medicine, the study of this new, self-assembling insulin will continue with approval by the National Institutes of Health toward the goal of human clinical trials….

“The goal of all drug therapies is to make therapeutic molecules more selective, in other words, more effective with less complications. We’ve sought to accomplish this with our engineering a new and “smarter” insulin molecule, as the hormone’s primary job is to bind to the key receptors that regulate blood glucose concentration (designated the insulin receptor), not cancer-related receptors,” says Dr. Weiss.

The new insulin analog exhibits reduced binding to a receptor that can drive cell growth, called the IGF receptor. Protein engineering spans both basic science and its translation to clinical care. Critical to reaching the translational goal of improved insulin therapy was an interdisciplinary team, including endocrinologist, Dr. Ismail-Beigi; biochemist, Nelson Phillips, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry; X-ray crystallographer, Zhu-li Wan, PhD, instructor in biochemistry; and receptor expert, Jonathan Whittaker, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry.

The study concludes and demonstrates, “…The potential of interfacial zinc-binding sites, introduced by design, to modify the pharmacokinetics of a protein in a subcutaneous depot. Such bottom-up control of assembly illustrates general principles of supramolecular chemistry and their application to nanobiotechnology.

“Zinc stapling of insulin exemplifies a general strategy to modify the pharmacokinetic and biological properties of a subcutaneous protein depot. The engineering of novel lattice contacts in protein crystals can thus enable control of supramolecular assembly as a therapeutic protein nanotechnology.”

via:sciencedaily.com

HCC is a primary cancer of the liver. Worldwide, it accounts for approximately 5.4% of all cancers1 and it is the third cause of cancer-related death with more than 660,000 deaths per year1. Only around 20-30% of patients are treated with curative treatments, including resection and local ablation, but recurrence complicated the outcome in more than two thirds of these cases .

Results of this study identified two gene signatures- one coming from the tumor and the other from the cirrhotic liver — able to identify patients with poor disease outcome. The study concluded that these genetic tools can ultimately be used to select patients for preventive therapies. In addition, specific genes included in these signatures should be evaluated as potential targets for adjuvant treatment, following surgical intervention in HCC patients.

Dr Josep Llovet, Professor from the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona-IDIBAPS and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who led the study and highlighted this topic at EASL’s official press conference said, “The results of our study demonstrate the potential that molecular classification offers to future clinical management of diseases such as HCC. By successfully identifying certain genomic signatures that clearly predict both overall and early recurrence of HCC post-surgery, we now have a clearer focus for future research into therapeutic options that may in time improve patients’ chances of survival.”…

The study was presented at EASL by Augusto Villanueva, MD member of the International HCC Genomic Consortium. The genomic profiles of 287 HCC patients using whole-genome gene expression platforms were analysed. The study focussed on patients with early HCC (n=257, principally male 189/257, with a mean age of 64) with tumoral tissue (n=257) and adjacent non-tumoural cirrhotic tissue (n=209). Patients were on average followed up after 46 months — there were 167 recurrences (64%) and 89 deaths (34%). In total, 20 gene signatures were evaluated with reported ability to predict survival and or recurrence of HCC. Genomic signatures from the tumour (Proliferation-G3) and adjacent tissue (with poor prognosis) of patients with HCC were identified as important in predicting both overall and early recurrence in HCC. The multinodularity gene signature was also identified as a predictor for HCC recurrence while tumor size was identified as predictor for early recurrence

via:sciencedaily.com

Gloucester, founded in 2003, focused on developing new therapies to fulfill unmet medical needs in cancer treatment. The acquisition adds Istodax (romidepsin) to Celgene’s already established cancer portfolio. Istodax received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November 2009 for treating CTCL patients who have received at least one prior systemic therapy. Celgene is expected to launch the drug in the first half of this year. Furthermore, it will pursue the European approval for Istodax in CTCL besides advancing the drug’s development for other cancer indications, including peripheral T-cell lymphoma (PTCL).

Additionally, Istodax has been granted orphan drug designation for the treatment of non-Hodgkin’s T-cell lymphoma and Fast Track status in PTCL by the U.S. regulatory agency. The drug has received orphan status designation from the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products for treating both CTCL and PTCL patients. We believe that the inclusion of Istodax in the cancer portfolio of a large company like Celgene would boost its sales and allow it a competitive edge over rival drugs such as Allos Therapeutics’ (NasdaqGM: ALTH – News) injectable treatment for PTCL − Folotyn − which hit the market in 2009.

The acquisition should further strengthen Celgene’s cancer portfolio. It already boasts of Revlimid, currently approved for myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and second-line multiple myeloma (MM) and the company is expanding its label into other indications. Furthermore, its product portfolio includes Vidaza for MDS, which should also drive growth.

However, sales of Celgene’s Thalomid have been declining. We feel this decline will continue since safer and more effective drugs are available for multiple myeloma in the form of Revlimid and Takeda’s Velcade.

We believe that the addition of Istodax is aimed to make up for the disappointing performance of Thalomid.

The 38-year-old actor said in a media statement that he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a treatable cancer of the lymphatic system.

He did not say when the diagnosis was made.

Via: