mesothelioma

Treatment could be tested in women within 18 to 24 months, expert suggests

Posted July 30, 2009

THURSDAY, July 30 (HealthDay News) -- Treatment with "suicide" genes slowed ovarian tumor growth in mice and may one day offer a way to treat late-stage ovarian cancer in women, U.S. scientists say.Currently, there is no effective treatment for advanced ovarian cancer that has recurred after surgery and primary chemotherapy, according to a news release from the American Association for Cancer Research.

In the laboratory experiments on mice, the researchers found that nanoparticle delivery of diphtheria toxin-encoding DNA selectively expressed in ovarian cancer cells significantly slowed the growth of ovarian tumors. The findings appear online in the journal Cancer Research.

"This report is definitely a reason to hope," lead researcher Janet Sawicki, a professor at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, said in the news release.

"We now have a potential new therapy for the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer that has promise for targeting tumor cells and leaving healthy cells healthy."

The new treatment, which could be tested on humans within 18 to 24 months, could prove to be a significant advance in targeted therapy for cancer, according to Dr. Edward Sausville, an associate editor of Cancer Research and associate director for clinical research at the Greenebaum Cancer Center at the University of Maryland."In oncology we have been studying ways to kill tumors for a long time, but much of this has run up against the real estate principle of location, location, location. In other words, an effective therapy is not effective if it cannot get to the target," Sausville said in the news release.

He noted that the approach described in this study offers multiple ways to target ovarian cancer cells.

By Ron Agostini
ragostini@modbee.com

At first impression, it appears Amy Paradis could be carried away by a stiff breeze.

She stands 5-foot-3 and looks the part of a former gymnast, which she is. But check again. Her eyes shine and she walks with a purpose, as though her agenda is locked in place.

Paradis, 40, always seeks a challenge. Like climbing to the top of Mt. Shasta.

"Lost a pant size and climbed a mountain," she summarized.

There's a lot more, of course, to both her feat and her motivation. Paradis, a Modesto nurse practitioner, agreed to tackle Mt Shasta, all 14,179 feet of it, in the annual Climb Against the Odds for the Breast Cancer Fund.

Paradis was inspired by her mother-in-law, a 24-year breast cancer survivor, along with a stricken co-worker. Here are other important things you must know about her: She often cares for sick and prematurely born babies and, by the way, she's not intimidated by challenges.

Which means her strength, both physical and emotional, belies her tiny frame.

"When she puts her mind to it, she goes," says her husband Dave, a Modesto doctor. Together, they've traveled long distances on mountain bikes and even hiked to the top of Mt. Whitney two years ago.

"It takes a lot to get her down," he continued, "which is a good trait to have when you're climbing a mountain."

One doesn't just wake up one morning and decide to take on Mt. Shasta and its icy and wind-swept ridges. The project required training, guts and a thrill for the quest. Paradis also was assisted by about eight months worth of Pilates core workouts ("I'm a big believer").

Her party of 28, led by Shasta Mountain Guides, embarked on June 28. Twenty joined Paradis on the summit 10 hours later -- eight stopped due to fatigue or altitude illness -- and Paradis returned home with stories to last the rest of summer.

"I was more of an excited nervous," she said. "I never had a moment where I was in an unsafe situation. I knew we were in good hands."

She was more at ease snowshoeing or riding bikes, of course, than being tethered together by ropes. No, this was new.

"It's very much out of your comfort zone with the crampons on your feet, the harness around your waist, being roped to another person and carrying an ice ax," Paradis said. "You must practice special steps to balance the exertion on specific muscle groups. You can't just walk a straight line up like on stairs. You would fry your calves within a few hundred feet."

  She learned techniques like pressure breathing "to keep the CO2 from building up in your lungs so you can exchange more oxygen," and specialized steps to retain leverage and balance.

The party climbed Mt. Shasta's daunting West Face, steep and long. It rested for 10-minute "maintenance breaks" each hour.

Paradis gazed ahead at 12,800 feet and thought, "Boy, the mountain is getting bigger." At 13,500 feet halfway up "Misery Hill," fatigue nearly defeated her.

"One of our leaders and I had a little chat. He just happened to know," she said. "He gave a little pep talk and we had a little hydration and some food and off we went. You got so focused on your technique, where you put every foot for safety, you really didn't focus much on exertion."

By the time they reached their destination, they had been rejuvenated. "You knew by then you're going to get there, so you're just Jones-ing and riding adrenaline and you have a permanent smile on your face," Paradis said."

Paradis also was pushed by other breast cancer patients on the climb, some with no previous experience on any mountain.

"Whenever I had a 'What am I doing?' moment, I would look at the other rope teams," she said. "These are women weakened by cancer. I didn't have cancer and I thought, 'I just have a blister on my toe. Keep going.' "

And so she did.

Carly Chomer, a Breast Cancer Fund spokeswoman, said the Climb Against the Odds raised more than $450,000. More is needed. An alarming one in every eight women will be tormented by breast cancer this year in the U.S.

"I saw women in their 30s who were completely healthy with no risk factors get slapped in the face with a breast cancer diagnosis, and they climbed that mountain," Paradis said.

Will she try it again?

"I'm going to let it percolate a little bit," she said, and then it percolated for a few seconds.

"I will do it again with the breast cancer fund. I'm sure I will."

London, England - July 12, 2009

The British Safety Council is urging a national audit of asbestos in schools all over the United Kingdom. In the UK, 16 teachers die each year from mesothelioma or other asbestos-related illnesses, and many other people in other professions also succumb to the disease. In the US, mesothelioma kills between 2,500 and 3,000 people each year.

Brian Nimick, the chief executive of the British Safety Council, stated that it was unacceptable that no risk assessment of the problem in UK schools had been completed. The National Union of Teachers agrees with the British Safety Council. Mr. Nimick spoke at a conference on corporate responsibility, and informed his audience that there had been 228 asbestos-related deaths among teachers in the UK over the last 14 years. Nimick is urging UK officials to conduct the asbestos audit, which will catalog and eventually remove asbestos. "It is unacceptable that the UK...has not yet undertaken a national audit of asbestos in schools and has not comprehensively assessed the risks that teachers and pupils in each and every school face; and has not allocated appropriate resources to take urgent remedial action," Nimick said.

Nimick continued, in hopes of driving his point home. "In 2009 it is estimated that more than 4,000 people will die from cancers caused by past exposure to asbestos in the workplace - making it the greatest single cause of work-related deaths in the UK...In the short-term school heads and chairs of governors may want to ask themselves this question: 'Would you allow members of your family to attend a school or college where the asbestos risk had not been assessed?'"

Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, will support Nimick's call for an audit, and has promised to take up the matter with Prime Minister Gordon Brown. "Teachers, school staff and children need to be in a safe learning environment with no risk to their health or safety...In particular the risk assessment needs to focus on children, who are particularly vulnerable."

A new theory on how lung cancer spreads could lead to advancements in treatments and provides oncologists worldwide with a better understanding of how lung cancer metastasizes

A group of researchers led by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that lung cancer cells use when spreading to other parts of the body, a finding that experts believe will further the understanding of how all cancers metastasize and dictate future trends in the treatment of lung and other cancers.

Researchers from VTT, as well as several others from the Universities of Turku (Finland) and Heidelberg (Germany), joined together in this endeavor to discover how cancer cells are able to change in such a manner that a factor that previously assisted them in staying in place starts to assist the cells’ adhesion receptors, eventually becoming the precondition needed by the cells to migrate to other parts of the body. Furthermore, the study showed that cancer cells use their adhesion receptors in a manner that was previously unknown to cancer researchers.

Findings such as this will assist researchers who are dealing with the study of all kinds of lung cancers, including malignant pleural mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer that metastasizes quickly and generally kills within a year or two of diagnosis. Mesothelioma causes include exposure to toxic asbestos, usually on the job or through home improvement or other projects where one encounters asbestos dust.

Typical mesothelioma treatment methods have traditionally proven less than successful, but discoveries such as the one made in Finland could help steer mesothelioma doctors, like Dr. Raphael Bueno of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, to look in other directions for more successful treatments of this incurable form of cancer. Robins has published numerous articles on advanced metastasized lung cancer and its treatment and is considered to be an expert in the field.

The results of the Finnish-led study were recently printed in the May 2009 issue of Nature Cell Biology, a leading scientific journal.

For additional information regarding asbestos exposure, mesothelioma causes, and mesothelioma treatment options, please visit the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center.

TNT coaches Nicole Pele, left, and Lise Nyrop, center, talk with Jessica Wieberg outside Forum 8 Theaters June 18. Pele, Nyrop and Wieberg are participating in the Nations Triathlon in Washington, D.C. in September and took 50 percent of the Theater's concession sales, as well as donations from theater patrons, for leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma research. ¦ James Ostler

COLUMBIA — Coach Nicole Pele and budding triathlete Jessica Wieberg walked to the trailhead of the MKT Trail at Forum Boulevard on a recent, humid Wednesday evening. "Soon you will be dripping sweat," said Pele, who'd already finished a very hot hourlong run.

Such is life lately for Pele and Wieberg, residents in pathology at University Hospital. When they're not studying cancer in their medical scrubs at the hospital, odds are they're on the trail in bike shorts and track shoes, contributing to cancer research in their spare time.

Wieberg is part of a newly formed Columbia chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team In Training (TNT), a sports training program that aims to raise money for cancer research while training its members to participate in national sporting events.

The seven-member Columbia TNT chapter is training for the Nation's Triathlon this September in Washington, and each member is required to raise at least $4,500 for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to get there.

For Columbia’s TNT teammates, it’s more about the mission than winning a medal or reaching a personal time goal, which is not to say that they take training for a triathlon lightly.

"For a while, I didn't know if I could do it," Wieberg said. "When I first started I could barely run a mile without stopping. But every day I see people in their 50s that die of heart attacks. I don’t want to be that person.”

Thus far, Columbia residents have been very supportive of team members' fundraising efforts, said Pele, who coaches the team along with Lise Nyrop.

“People in Columbia that we did not know gave $400 in two and a half hours” at a fundraiser outside a grocery store in May, Pele said.

In June, TNT members held a fundraiser outside Forum 8 movie theater. They rode bike trainers at its entrance and took 50 percent of all concessions purchased that night.

Members of Columbia's TNT chapter began training in May. Pele and Nyrop had trained for events together previously, and wanted to put their efforts toward a good cause.

London, July 1: Keeping away from meat can help keep away cancer. New research has established that vegetarians had a 12 percent fewer chance of contacting a cancer compared to their non vegetarian counterparts.

For certain types of cancers, like leukemia, bladder and stomach cancer, the risk is more pronounced for carnivores. Fresh research concludes that vegetarians are 45 percent less likely to develop cancer of the blood.

Conformity to previous research
The study examined 61,000 people, aged between 20 and 89, for over 12 years.

During the course of the study, 3,350 people were diagnosed with cancer. Out of these 68 percent of the participants were carnivorous and another 9.5 percent ate fish but did not consume any meat. About a quarter of the participants that were diagnosed with cancer were pure vegetarians.

The study controlled factors like obesity, alcoholism, smoking and lifestyle to negate their impact on the results.

The findings of the study conform to previous research that highlights the importance of shunning meat. It is for this reason that the findings were not completely astounding.

Reason still unclear
The study could not establish the cause of the correlation between meat eating and cancer risk.

Co-author Naomi Allen, from the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, said, “Previous research has found that processed meat may increase the risk of stomach cancer, so our findings that vegetarians and fish eaters are at lower risk is plausible. But we do not know why cancer of the blood is lower in vegetarians."

She added, “We need to know what aspect of a fish and vegetarian diet is protecting against cancer. Is it the higher fibre intake, higher intake of fruit and vegetables, is it just meat per se?”

While the findings underscore the health benefits of leafy diets, the study does not unequivocally establish that vegetarianism is the magic potion for all diseases.

Emphasizing the need for further research on the subject, Richard Lowe, chief executive of Eblex, the English beef and lamb executive, said, "We think that the link between diet and cancer is complex and as scientists themselves say, more research is needed to see how big a part diet plays."

What, however, is crystal clear is that shifting diets and turning away from meat could help people avoid some kind of diseases.

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Vegetarians are 12 percent less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters and the advantage is particularly marked when it comes to cancers of the blood, British researchers said on Wednesday.

Past research has shown that eating lots of red or processed meat is linked to a higher rate of stomach cancer and the new study, involving more than 60,000 people, did confirm a lower risk of both stomach and bladder cancer.

But the most striking and surprising difference was in cancers of the blood -- such as leukemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma -- where the risk of disease was 45 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat eaters.

"More research is needed to substantiate these results and to look for reasons for the differences," Tim Key, study author from the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, said.

Key and colleagues, who published their findings in the British Journal of Cancer, followed 61,000 meat eaters and vegetarians for over 12 years, during which time 3,350 of the participants were diagnosed with cancer.

The study, which looked at 20 different types of cancer, found the differences in risk were independent of other factors such as smoking, alcohol intake and obesity, which can all increase the chance of developing cancer.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler, editing by Paul Casciato)

The University of Manchester and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have launched a major new e-science resource for biologists – which could accelerate research into treatments for H1N1 flu and cancer.

Biocatalogue.org, a centralised registry of curated life science Web Services, is being officially launched today (Wednesday 1 July) at the 17^th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the 8^th European Conference on Computational Biology conference (ISMB-ECCB 2009) in Stockholm.

This type of systematic access has the potential to significantly accelerate the work of researchers in the medical, agronomical and pharmaceutical fields. The service allows researchers to discover, annotate, register and use biological web-based services.

Biocatalogue.org already has around 1,000 biological Web Services – and more and more will be registered and annotated by services providers, curators and users on a daily basis.

Services are monitored by automated mechanisms and by the user community for their availability and reliability. A simple traffic light system displays the current status of a Web Service.

In addition to providing the means to programmatically access life science tools and databases over the Internet, the facility acts as a place where researchers can contact and meet the experts and maintainers of these services.

Web services have gained a momentum as a means for packaging existing data and computational resources in a form that is amenable for use and composition by third party applications.

The life science community is among the first adopters of Web Services. Taverna, a workflow workbench that is popular within the life science community – and which was jointly developed by computer scientists at The University of Manchester – provides access to over 3,500 Web Services that can be composed by scientists for constructing and enacting their in silico experiments.

But one of the main issues that hinders the wide adoption and use of Web Services is the difficulty in locating those that perform the analysis the scientist is interested in.

With Biocatalogue.org, Web Services are annotated by expert curators, service providers and by the wider Community using tags, rating, comments and ontologies. Automated mining and monitoring tools are also used.

The project has been led by Prof Carole Goble at The University of Manchester and Rodrigo Lopezat EMBL EBI.

Other contributors include Khalid Belhajjame,Franck Tanoh, Jiten Bhagat, Katy Wolstencroft and Robert Stevensfrom The University of Manchester and Eric Nzuobontane, Hamish McWilliam and Thomas Laurent from EMBL EBI.

The project is been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Notes for editors

BioCatalogue leverages from existing registry such as BioMoby and seekda. BioCatalogue will merge with the Embrace registry

For more information on Biocatalogue.org, please contact:

Prof Carole Goble
Carole.goble@manchester.ac.uk

Rodrigo Lopez
rls@ebi.ac.uk

About The University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is Britain's largest single-site university with a proud history of achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future. It is a member of the Russell Group, was ranked with the elite group of research universities traditionally formed by the triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London in the recent Research Assessment Exercise 2008. Its external research income is £263 million.

About the European Bioinformatics Institute

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). The EBI grew out of EMBL's pioneering work in providing public biological databases to the research community. It hosts some of the world's most important collections of biological data, including DNA sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), three-dimensional structures (the Macromolecular Structure Database), data from microarray experiments (ArrayExpress), protein–protein interactions (IntAct) and pathway information (Reactome). The EBI hosts several research groups and its scientists continually develop new tools for the biocomputing community.

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by Rick Moriarty

Courtesy of Upstate Medical University

Ziwei Huang, a leading cancer researcher studying new drug treatments, will head Upstate Medical University's pharmacology department.

Syracuse, NY -- Ziwei Huang, a cancer researcher from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the University of California at San Diego, has been appointed professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Upstate Medical University.

Huang (pronounced Wang) will also serve as director of a newly created research center, the State University of New York Upstate Cancer Research Institute. His appointment was announced Monday and is effective Aug. 17.

Dr. Steven Scheinman, Upstate's senior vice president and dean of the College of Medicine, said Huang will elevate the university's research stature and help lead faculty in collaborative research efforts.

"His accomplishments have been impressive and have been characterized by a collaborative style that reaches across departments and boundaries," said Scheinman.

Huang, 43, fills a vacancy left by the departure of Dr. Jose Jalife, who left with about 25 researchers in March 2008 to conduct cardiovascular research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The researchers had brought in about $5 million a year in federal research grants to Upstate Medical University. They took all but about $500,000 of the grants with them to Michigan.

Huang will bring more than $2 million in National Institutes of Health to Syracuse.

Scheinman said Huang will start a search this summer to fill five faculty positions left vacant by the departure of Jalife's team. Each of the new faculty members is expected to bring their own team of researchers with them, he said.

Since 2004, Huang has been a member of the faculty at the Burnham Institute and its National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center.

Scheinman said a major focus of Huang's research is on a family of proteins that are key regulators of programmed cell death. The failure of some cells to die when they are supposed to is believed to be a trigger for many diseases, including cancer, neurodegenerative disorders and infectious diseases.

Huang has lectured worldwide and published more than 100 research articles, reviews, book chapters and conference proceedings. He also is editor of the book, "Drug Discovery Research: New Frontiers in the Post-Genomic Era," which highlights research by leading experts on new drug development, cancer, infectious disease, neurodegenerative disease and stem cells.

Staff writer Rick Moriarty can be reached at 470-3148 or rmoriarty@syracuse.com.

Dr. Mark Evers, director of the Markey Cancer Center, stood with the UK HealthCare team at the Fight Back ceremony during the American Cancer Society's Fayette County Relay for Life.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 29, 2009) – Dr. Mark Evers, director of the University of Kentucky's Markey Cancer Center, offered hope and encouragement to cancer survivors and their families Friday night during the "Fight Back" ceremony at the American Cancer Society's Fayette County Relay for Life.
Relay for Life is the American Cancer Society’s largest annual fundraiser, with local events taking place in dozens of communities across the country. Each Relay for Live event consists of three phases: Celebrate, Remember and Fight Back. UK HealthCare was the Fight Back sponsor for Fayette County. 
Evers said he became aware of the devastation of cancer when he was just four years old. A young playmate of his was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and died after a desperate struggle with the disease. 
"Back then, Hodgkin's was a death sentence," Evers said. "Today, it is a very survivable disease. And this illustrates the main point I want to make, which is that research provides hope. The knowledge that we gain in the laboratory results in new treatments that can save people's lives."
Evers then told the story of his father, who has fought three different types of cancer and is now 87 years old. 
Teams from UK HealthCare raised more than $4,000 for the American Cancer Society. But there is a value for participants that goes far beyond the money raised, said Celeste Clevinger, the Fight Back chair for Fayette County.
"Relay for Life is a great way to raise money for cancer research, but it's also a very emotional event for survivors and their families, and for people who have lost a loved one to cancer," said Clevinger, who works in the UK College of Agriculture."Everyone here has been touched deeply by this disease."