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 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…)

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…)

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…)