Cancer Research Journal » Pancreatic Cancer

Siteman Cancer Center Offers Free Podcasts on iTunes

Lisa — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:05:08 +0000

Would you rather listen to cancer news than read about it? The Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center can help you out.

The Siteman Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center located at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine, produces an informative audio podcast series called Cancer Connection which you can get free on iTunes.

Siteman offers Cancer Connection at no cost to inform the public about breakthroughs in cancer research, prevention and treatment.

Cancer Connection’s format lets you hear updates on a variety of cancer-related topics when it’s convenient for you. You can choose to listen to individual episodes on your computer, download the archives on your hard drive to reference later, or transfer them to an iPod / MP3 player to hear while you’re on the go. When I last checked, there were 26 episodes posted in the archives.

Each episode runs about 10 minutes and new ones are being added to iTunes a couple times a month. Recent segments have featured experts on hereditary cancer, pancreatic cancer surgery, and radiation oncology.

If you’d like to find other interesting cancer broadcasts, check out Yale Cancer Center Answers and Mayo Clinic Podcasts.

Source: Siteman Cancer Center News and Events

Mayo Clinic Oncologists Answer Cancer Questions Online

Lisa — Sat, 03 May 2008 03:57:52 +0000

One of the top cancer treatment facilities in the world is offering you the opportunity to e-mail your questions about cancer to their oncology experts.

The Mayo Clinic web site has a feature called Ask a Cancer Specialist which allows anybody with internet access the chance to ask Mayo’s experienced specialists their tough cancer questions for free – even if they’re not a patient at one of Mayo’s facilities.

If your question is selected, Mayo will publish both the question and the answer on Mayo’s web site. Queries and responses are archived on the web site so other cancer patients and caregivers can benefit from the exchange.

Not all questions get a response, but a lot of good information is circulated in this forum. Alternative medicines, chemobrain, and pancreatic cancer treatments are just a few of the topics Mayo’s doctors have already discussed.

While some cancer support groups and hospitals manage chat rooms which include discussions with health professionals interspersed with messages of encouragement and personal testimonials, Mayo’s Ask a Cancer Specialist site concentrates on medical information alone — a real time saver if you’re short on time and facts are all you need. The clinic also posts the name, photo, title and some background on the physician who provided the response so you’ll know where the information originated.

This type of health tool appears to have a lot of potential value for cancer patients and I’ve looked for similar services from other oncologists, but so far I haven’t found any being updated regularly. If you’ve seen any other high quality sites our readers should know about, please send me an e-mail (Lisa@CancerResearchJournal.com) and I’ll add them to our del.icio.us bookmarks.

Source: CancerResearchJournal.com

UCLA Kills Cancer Cells With Light-Activated Nanoimpeller

Lisa — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:18:32 +0000

Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a new light-activated nanomachine which can store anticancer drugs and release them into cancer cells.

Researchers from the California NanoSystems Institute and the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA created the tiny cargo-carrying nanoparticles as a mechanism to deliver targeted chemotherapy drugs or dyes inside living cancer cells, where they can then be released by photoactivation.

To make this controlled release possible, Jeffrey Zink and Fuyu Tamanoi, co-directors of UCLA’s Nano Machine Center for Targeted Delivery and On-Demand Release, coated molecule-sized pores with azobenzene and loaded them with anticancer drugs. Once these engineered nanoparticles had their cargo, they were given to human cancer cells in vitro in the dark.

After the nanoparticles, known as nanoimpellers, were taken up by the cancer cells, the drug delivery mechanism was remote-activated by exposing the particles to light.

Zink and Tamanoi’s team tested the nanoimpellers on a variety of malignant cells including human colon and pancreatic cancers and found they were successful in causing cell death. They believe the discovery has strong implications for the future of cancer treatment. As they explained,

“This system has potential applications for precise drug delivery and might be the next generation for novel platforms for the treatment of cancers such as colon and stomach cancer. The fact that one can operate the mechanism by remote control means that one can administer repeated small-dosage releases to achieve greater control of the drug’s effect.”

Fuyu Tamanoi, PhD and Jeffrey Zink, PhD
California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA

If you’d like to read more about the nanoimpeller, UCLA’s findings have been published in the March 31, 2008, advance online edition of the nanoscience journal Small.

Source: UCLA News

Europe OKs Oral Chemo for Advanced Colorectal Cancer

Lisa — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:25:03 +0000

Patients being treated for metastatic colorectal cancer in Europe just got a new treatment option.

Capecitabine, which is marketed by Switzerland-based pharmaceutical company Roche under the trade name Xeloda, has been approved by the European Commission for the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer.

European health officials approved the oral tablets for use in combination with any chemotherapy in all lines of treatment, with or without Avastin®, based on studies showing it produced approximately the same survival rates and level of safety as standard intravenous 5FU chemotherapies currently in use.

Oncologists are optimistic the drug will provide a valuable treatment alternative for thousands of patients in Europe who are diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer every year. As one explained,

“Until now, Xeloda has been available to only a few colorectal cancer patients. But several studies have now shown that almost all patients with colorectal cancer that has spread can benefit from Xeloda at any time and in combination with any chemotherapy treatment. It is a highly effective oral chemotherapy that reduces hospital treatment time by 160 hours compared to the old standard chemotherapy, allowing patients to live as normal a life as possible.”

Professor Jim Cassidy
Cancer Research UK and Chair of Medical Oncology
Beatson Oncology Centre, University of Glasgow

The most commonly reported side effects of Xeloda are diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, stomatitis and hand-foot syndrome.

This latest action adds to growing list of Xeloda-related approvals impacting cancer patients and professionals in more than 100 countries. South Korea has already licensed the drug as a first-line treatment for stomach cancer and for metastatic pancreatic cancer in combination with gemcitabine. In Japan, the treatment is licensed for advanced breast cancer. The US Food and Drug Administration approved capecitabine for adjuvant (post-surgery) treatment of colon cancer in June 2005.

If you’d like to learn more about treatment options available to colorectal cancer patients in the US, you can visit the National Cancer Institute’s Colon and Rectal Cancer page.

Sources: Reuters and Medical News Today

Technorati Tags: XELOX; palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia; pharmacodynamics; Centre for Oncology and Applied Pharmacology

MGH Microchip Device Isolates Circulating Tumor Cells

Lisa — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:48:06 +0000

Scientists from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) BioMicroMechanical Systems (BioMEMS) Resource Center and the MGH Cancer Center have developed a new microchip-based device that can isolate circulating tumor cells (CTC) in a blood sample.

The new CTC-chip is a business-card sized silicon chip covered with almost 80,000 microscopic posts smaller than a human hair. The specially designed posts are coated with antibodies that act like a glue so the tumor cells will adhere to them.

Unlike the current technologies used to detect CTCs, this test doesn’t require any pre-processing of the blood samples so fragile CTCs aren’t destroyed before they can be counted.

To evaluate the device, the researchers took blood samples from cancer patients with breast, colorectal, lung, pancreatic and prostate tumors as well as healthy control subjects. The CTC-chip produced a 99% sensitivity rating in the patients with cancer and registered no CTCs in samples from cancer-free control volunteers.

Although more studies will be required before the CTC-chip is ready for clinical use, the researchers are optimistic this new device will one day give oncologists a way to quickly monitor how patients are responding to therapy. As one of the scientists explained,

“Some of these tumors have several potential drugs to choose from, and the ability to monitor therapeutic response in real time with this device – which has an exquisite sensitivity to CTCs – could rapidly signal whether a treatment is working or if another option should be tried.”

Mehmet Toner, PhD
Director, BioMEMS Resource Center
Massachusetts General Hospital

If you’d like to learn more about this project, details have been published in the December 20, 2007, edition of Nature.

Source: HarvardScience

Related Links: ajc.com; henryfordhealth.org

Tags: Daniel Haber, MD, PhD; Ronald Tompkins, MD, ScD; nanofluidics; nanobiotechnology; Boston; Harvard Medical School; Shriner’s Hospital; metastatic disease

Diabetic Women Have Higher Risk of Colorectal Cancer

Lisa — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:19:06 +0000

Research conducted by the University of Minnesota shows women with diabetes are 50 percent more likely to develop colorectal cancer than non-diabetic women.

To perform their study, the team analyzed data on over 45,000 women who participated in a large-scale breast cancer study conducted at 29 medical facilities during the 1970s. The records indicated females diagnosed with diabetes were 1.5 times more likely to develop tumors in the colon and rectum than those without the metabolic disorder.

According to the study’s lead author, Dr Andrew Flood, elevated insulin levels may play a part in promoting colorectal cancer, and possibly others such as pancreatic cancer. As he stated,

“Colorectal cancer and type II diabetes share a number of common factors, including obesity, so it is interesting to see the direct line between these two conditions.”

Andrew Flood, PhD
Asst Professor, Epidemiology and Community Health
University of Minnesota School of Public Health &
University of Minnesota Cancer Center

Until more is known about the correlation between diabetes and cancer, experts suggest that diabetics effectively manage their glucose levels and consider reducing the time between colonoscopies so any potential problems can be detected early.

Results of the study were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research’s 6th Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research held December 5-8, 2007, in Philadelphia.

Source: ABC News

Related Links: AACR News; UMCC 2007 News Release; Reuters

Tags: polyps; gastroenterology; gastrointestinal cancers; cancer risk factors

Triptolide Could Help Treat Pancreatic Cancer

Lisa — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:30:08 +0000

Research conducted at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center has found that a natural compound helps break down treatment-resistant pancreatic cancer.

The compound, known as triptolide, is a toxic agent which has been used as a natural medicine in China for hundreds of years.

In the Minnesota study, Ashok Saluja, PhD, discovered triptolide had the ability to invade heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) which serves as a survival mechanism for cancer cells. Results of experiments with mice showed those who received triptolide experienced decreased cancer growth and significantly fewer invasions into the spleen, liver, kidney and small intestine.

Other reports have indicated triptolide may also be an effective therapy for breast cancer, bladder cancer, melanoma and stomach cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is usually well advanced when it is detected and difficult to treat. Approximately half of the 37,000 people diagnosed annually in the United States die within four months of discovering they have the disease.

Dr Saluja and his team hope to refine the compound so clinical trials on patients with cancer of the pancreas can begin.

Findings from the study are published in the October issue of Cancer Research, a journal from the American Association for Cancer Research.

Source: University of Minnesota Cancer Center News Releases

Tags: Selwyn M. Vickers MD; University of Minnesota Academic Health Center; William E Grizzle; University of Alabama, Birmingham; tripterygiuym wilfordii; Rajinda K Dawra, PhD; biochemistry

Professor Dying of Pancreatic Cancer Gives Last Lecture

dc — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:00:41 +0000

Sometimes it can be difficult to detect exactly what causes a viral video to break out and become popular. That’s certainly not the case though with the growing circulation of Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch’s inspirational talk Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

Dr. Pausch’s sense of humor in the face of his bleak pancreatic cancer diagnosis along with the warm spirit with which he delivers some wisdom learned during his journey combines to create a story that resonates with those who experience it.

Here’s a short piece that captures some of the highlights:

Brightcove Video Enclosure of Wall Street Journal Story

The full lecture lasts about an hour and a half. You can watch it on Google Video or click here for the transcript.

Source: Wall Street Journal

tags: Brightcove; Entertainment Technology Center; Alice

Italian Scientists Tie Trop-2 Gene to Tumor Growth

Lisa — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:05:27 +0000

Scientists from the University of Chieti in Italy have found that a gene which normally functions in the placenta during the early stages of pregnancy is also expressed in most human cancers.

Professor Saverio Alberti and his team discovered that the Trop-2 gene was involved in the formation of invasive cells needed during the stage between when the egg is fertilized and the embryo is formed. That finding led them to wonder if Trop-2 might also play a part in another invasive function – tumor growth.

To find out, Alberti’s group studied 1,755 tumors using immunohistochemical analysis. Their research showed that Trop-2 was over-expressed 65% to 90% of the time (with a 74% average occurrence) in different categories of tumors. Additionally, the gene was present in the vast majority of human cancers including breast, colon, stomach, lung, prostate, ovarian, endometrial, cervical, and pancreatic cancers.

In comparison, most other known markers appear much less frequently and are only linked to smaller subgroups, such as PSA for prostate cancer.

Unraveling the secrets of two sequence elements present in the Trop-2 cytoplasmic tail has been one of the most intriguing parts of the study, say the researchers. They are hopeful their work will help identify the specific molecules responsible for the formation of metastases. As Professor Alberti stated,

“If we can identify such molecules we will be approaching a situation where we could influence their activity and hence either encourage or prevent it.”

The team presented their findings at the 14th European Cancer Conference held September 23-27, 2007, in Barcelona, Spain.

Source: News-Medical.Net

Tags: receptor; The Origin-of-Life Prize®; Chieti; blastocyst

What in the World is a Mini-Whipple?

Lisa — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:24:01 +0000

No, it’s not a tiny bird.

Or the latest step on Dancing With The Stars.

Actually, mini-Whipple is the nickname of a surgical procedure used to treat pancreatic cancer. The proper medical term for the procedure is pylorus-preserving pancreaticoduodenectomy and the technique is used to remove tumors in the head of the pancreas while sparing other parts of the anatomy. Patients usually experience fewer difficulties and shorter hospital stays with the mini-Whipple than with other surgical methods used as therapy for the disease.

If you’d like to see an actual mini-whipple procedure being performed, or learn about other major breakthroughs in pancreatic cancer care, OR-Live has a free webcast in their archives entitled Advancements in Pancreatic Cancer Care.

The surgery was performed at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, by their Chair of Surgery, Charles J. Yeo, MD, FACS. In this segment, Dr Yeo is joined by colleagues specializing in anesthesiology, gastroenterology, radiology, and surgery who discuss recent innovations in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with the disease.

OR-Live will be broadcasting more cancer-related webcasts on October 10th (breast cancer) and Oct 18th (lymphoma). If you’re interested, you can also sign up to receive e-mail reminders about future healthcasts.

Caution: OR-Live videos contain close-up shots of actual surgeries. The graphic images may not be suitable for some viewers.

Source: marketwire.com

Tags: oncology; upper duodendum; resection; stomach; Jefferson Medical College; Philadelphia; Pennsylvania