Levels of hormones affecting the efficiency of cervical cancer medicine

New class of anticancer drugs may cause endometrial cancer that regulate growth hormone environment known as PARP inhibitors are sensitive substantially, UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher shows for the first time. Could lead to novel one-to-punch therapy to fight cancer of the endometrium survey offers particularly sophisticated is disease, limited effectiveness of conventional treatment for alternative options.

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New weapon for Penn Medicine thyroid cancer two survey results reveal.

Over the years faced to bleak prospects and a viable treatment options no patients with advanced thyroid cancer. But now the recent discovery of thyroid tumor in buildings, genetics, cell signaling pathways are using kinase inhibitors for r & d and exciting new weapons, disease that targets tumor cell division and blood vessels. University of Pennsylvania (Abramson Cancer Center to house) led by a researcher from Perelman, two recent clinical trials shows great promise of these new approaches. Work is displayed at the Amsterdam European Cancer Conference.

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Combining Chinese, Western medicine could lead to new cancer treatments

Sep. 28, 2013 — Combining traditional forms of Chinese and Western medicine could offer new hope for developing new treatments for liver, lung, colorectal cancers and osteosarcoma of the bones.

Experts from Cardiff University's School of Medicine have joined forces with Peking University in China to test the health benefits of a traditional Chinese medicine.

The team also set-out to examine how by combining it with more traditional methods like Chemotherapy could improve patient outcomes and potentially lead to the development of new cancer treatments and therapies.

"Traditional Chinese medicine where compounds are extracted from natural products or herbs has been practised for centuries in China, Korea, Japan and other countries in Asia," according to Professor Wen Jiang from Cardiff University's School of Medicine, who is the director of the Cardiff University-Peking University Joint Cancer Institute at Cardiff and led the research as part of a collaboration between Cardiff University and Peking University.

"Although a few successes, most of the traditional remedies are short of scientific explanation which has inevitably led to scepticism -- especially amongst traditionalists in the West.

"As a result, we set out to test the success of a Chinese medicine and then consider how combining it alongside traditional methods like Chemotherapy could result in positive outcome for patients," he adds.

Yangzheng Xiaoji is a traditional Chinese formula consisting of 14 herbs. The formula has been shown to be beneficial to cancer patients -- however, until now how it works has remained unknown.

Since 2012 the Team have investigated how the formula works, discovering that it works by blocking a pathway which stops the spread of cancer cells in the body.

"The formula has been shown to be beneficial to patients with certain solid tumours, when used alone and in conventional therapies, such as Chemotherapy.

"It suggests that combining the formula with conventional as well as new therapies could hold the key to developing new treatments for cancer patients.

"We are already looking to clinical trials in treatment of lung and other cancer types."

View the original article here

Combining Chinese, Western medicine could lead to new cancer treatments

Sep. 28, 2013 — Combining traditional forms of Chinese and Western medicine could offer new hope for developing new treatments for liver, lung, colorectal cancers and osteosarcoma of the bones.

Experts from Cardiff University's School of Medicine have joined forces with Peking University in China to test the health benefits of a traditional Chinese medicine.

The team also set-out to examine how by combining it with more traditional methods like Chemotherapy could improve patient outcomes and potentially lead to the development of new cancer treatments and therapies.

"Traditional Chinese medicine where compounds are extracted from natural products or herbs has been practised for centuries in China, Korea, Japan and other countries in Asia," according to Professor Wen Jiang from Cardiff University's School of Medicine, who is the director of the Cardiff University-Peking University Joint Cancer Institute at Cardiff and led the research as part of a collaboration between Cardiff University and Peking University.

"Although a few successes, most of the traditional remedies are short of scientific explanation which has inevitably led to scepticism -- especially amongst traditionalists in the West.

"As a result, we set out to test the success of a Chinese medicine and then consider how combining it alongside traditional methods like Chemotherapy could result in positive outcome for patients," he adds.

Yangzheng Xiaoji is a traditional Chinese formula consisting of 14 herbs. The formula has been shown to be beneficial to cancer patients -- however, until now how it works has remained unknown.

Since 2012 the Team have investigated how the formula works, discovering that it works by blocking a pathway which stops the spread of cancer cells in the body.

"The formula has been shown to be beneficial to patients with certain solid tumours, when used alone and in conventional therapies, such as Chemotherapy.

"It suggests that combining the formula with conventional as well as new therapies could hold the key to developing new treatments for cancer patients.

"We are already looking to clinical trials in treatment of lung and other cancer types."

View the original article here

First randomized trial of targeted cancer medicine in all tumor types

Sep. 11, 2013 — A further step along the road to the personalisation of cancer medicine, where treatment is based on the individual molecular characteristics of tumours rather than their primary site, will be presented at the 2013 European Cancer Congress (ECC2013), which starts on Friday 27 September in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Dr Christophe Le Tourneau, Head of the Phase I Programme at the Institut Curie, Paris, France, will tell the congress that the SHIVA trial is the first randomised trial to look at patient outcomes after treatments were chosen according to the individual molecular profiles of each person's tumour. It is also the first trial to do this for all tumour types. About 40% of all those taking part in the trial have molecular abnormalities that can be targeted by existing drugs, he will say.

To date, 320 patients from seven comprehensive cancer centres across France have been included in this phase II trial, of whom 60 have been randomised. In the standard arm, the patients received the chemotherapy they would have received if they had not been participating in the trial. All patients had recurrent or metastatic cancer that was unresponsive to standard treatment for their disease.

"Our goal is to have 200 randomised patients," says Dr Le Tourneau. "Although 40% of the 320 patients have a tumour for which targeted drugs are available, some are still on the chemotherapy that was started at the time of the biopsy and therefore we will have to randomise them later. Because we are looking for an effect in different kinds of tumours, we have ruled out the inclusion of any particular type of tumour if this brings the number of randomised patients with this type to over 20% of the total. We have also allowed the inclusion of patients with rare tumours."

Preliminary results of the feasibility study, to be presented at the congress, show that this approach works, the researchers say. The ultimate goal of the phase II trial is to see whether the selection of drugs that target the specific molecular profiles of tumours will improve outcomes for patients.

Once the first 100 patients were included, the researchers looked at the feasibility of a biopsy of a metastasis, since the molecular profile of the primary tumour, if tissue is available, may not be the same as that found in a metastasis. They also investigated the quality of available tumour samples, the proportion of the patients for which the necessary analyses could be undertaken, the proportion for which a molecular abnormality can be identified and for which a targeted therapy exists, and the timeframe needed to establish the tumour profile.

"Recent advances in diagnostics have enabled us to ascertain the molecular profile of tumours in a timeframe which is compatible with good clinical care, but we needed to verify this in our study," says Dr Le Tourneau.

Unlike conventional chemotherapy, molecular targeted agents only work in the presence of their targets. Side-effects are lessened and, in principle, efficacy heightened. One of the problems to date, however, is that such drugs have principally been developed based on the primary location and histology (cellular make-up) of the tumour. This has meant that many potentially promising targeted drugs have failed in early clinical trials simply because they have not induced a response in a sufficient number of patients.

"The history of breast cancer changed beyond recognition with the discovery of the role played by the ErB2/HER2 gene, which is amplified in up to 20% of breast cancers. And we now know that trastuzumab (Herceptin), one of the most widely-used targeted cancer therapies, which targets that gene, is effective in several tumour types and not just in breast when the ERBB2/HER2 gene is amplified or even mutated," says Dr Le Tourneau. "We also know that patient outcomes in the few trials to date where the choice of treatment is based on a molecular abnormality are better than those where the treatment is not matched to the abnormality. What was missing to date is a histology-independent randomised trial comparing molecular targeted treatment with conventional therapy, and this is why I decided to set up the SHIVA trial."

Even today, the researchers say, molecularly targeted therapy for cancer patients is initially prescribed according to the location of the primary tumour. At the end of the trial, analysis of progression-free survival will show whether this practice needs to be changed.

A positive finding would imply the need to make major changes in the way cancer drugs are developed and tested in patients. But this would represent a new and difficult challenge.

"At present we have no data on the efficacy of drugs in patients with the same molecular abnormality but different tumour types, and we also suspect that a treatment effect would not depend on the presence of a single molecular abnormality, but, more likely, on several. However, we believe that it is most likely that, in future, tumour location and histology will no longer be the primary criteria for the prescription of molecularly targeted agents; rather, tumour biology will be the deciding factor," says Dr Le Tourneau. "A positive result from our trial would be an important step forward on the road to personalised medicine."

Professor Cornelis van de Velde, President of ECCO, said: "This ground-breaking randomised trial is very exciting since this is the way to individualise therapy. We have already moved from empirical to stratified treatment, and now we can offer patients personalised treatment based on the understanding of the particular molecular profiles of their tumours in order to select drugs that target a specific profile. The means to determine the individual molecular profiles of tumours will be readily available at low cost in the years to come, and the integration of biopsy-based molecular profiles with individual patient characteristics will enable precision diagnosis to be translated into precision personalised therapies. ECCO will have an important role to play in ensuring the incorporation of molecular biology genetics into clinical multidisciplinary meetings."

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