Audio Medica - Medical Audio News Interviews & Podcasts

Breast cancer chemoprevention: meta-analysis shows SERMs are highly effective

admin — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:51:04 +0000

LONDON—New and comprehensive data showing that millions of cases of breast cancer could be avoided by treating women at high risk of the disease — but who are not yet ill — with the class of drugs known as selective oestrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) have been published in a meta-analysis in The Lancet by researchers from the United Kingdom, Italy and the USA. Jack Cuzick, Professor of Epidemiology at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary University of London discussed the latest findings with Peter Goodwin and explained the background and some of the issues which have prevented this effective weapon against breast cancer being widely adopted until now.

BRCA-deficient cancers respond to combination of two experimental drugs

admin — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:42:05 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—Doctors taking the unusual step of combining two experimental drugs to treat cancers in patients who have mutated BRCA — the gene conferring susceptibility to breast, ovarian and some other solid tumours — found that patients responded through what appears to be a synergistic action. Dr Geoffrey Shapiro, Director of the Early Drug Development Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston presented findings at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting on the combination of sapacitabine (a nucleoside analogue) and seleciclib (a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor). He discussed the clinical potential of this technique with Peter Goodwin.

Treatment “holidays” to overcome resistance in advanced melanoma?

admin — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:40:18 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—Laboratory evidence that giving patients intermittent rather than continuous treatment with cancer drugs could help them overcome drug resistance in cancers such as melanoma was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research 2013 meeting. Dr Darrin Stuart from the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Emeryville, California, presented research findings on mice treated with vemurafenib. He told Peter Goodwin why he thought this should prompt clinicians to look carefully at drug scheduling and consider intermittent therapy as a means of overcoming resistance in patients with cancer.

Blood test reliably detects cancer mutations in gastrointestinal stromal tumour

admin — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:37:21 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—A new blood test has detected drug-resistant mutations reliably in patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumour (GIST) helping to guide therapy when first-line drugs had failed. This was in a study using the recently approved agent regorafenib. Dr George Demetri of the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center presented findings from the GRID study during the 2013 conference of the American Society for Cancer Research. He told Peter Goodwin why the blood test did better than biopsy testing and about the prospects of treating refractory GIST with rogarafenib.

Gene expression and molecular pathways guide head and neck cancer therapies

admin — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:30:46 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—Gene expression and molecular pathways in head and neck cancer have been identified with reference to The Cancer Genome Atlas in research presented at the American Association for Cancer Research annual conference. The PIK-3CA pathway and P 53 gene mutation were named as significant players in head and neck cancers by Dr David Neil Hayes of the Lineberger Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He told Peter Goodwin how his group’s analysis of tumour samples from patients with head and neck cancer have provided knowledge of disease mechanisms — revealing the need to individualise therapy with drugs such as epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors.

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Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy rescues kids with relapsing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia

admin — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:09:56 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—A new type of immunotherapy has brought responses in children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in relapse who had no other options to prevent the progress of this fatal phase of the disease. At the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting Dr Daniel W. Lee from the Pediatric Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, presented findings from his group’s study using chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, which involves removing T cells from the child, stimulating and genetically engineering them before re-infusing them in a primed state to fight the cancer. He discussed the clinical implications with Peter Goodwin.

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Treating HER 2 positive metastatic breast cancer without chemotherapy?

admin — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:07:39 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—Patients with metastatic breast cancer who are HER-2 positive could potentially be treated with the anti-HER-2 conjugated drug, trastuzumab-emtansine (T-DM1), alone — without needing to add chemotherapy. This prediction was made at the American Association for Cancer Research annual conference by Dr Jose Baselga Physician in Chief at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the basis of data the EMILIA study (which led to the approval of this agent in the USA in 2013). He gave Peter Goodwin details about the effectiveness of this new agent in the presence of PI-3 kinase mutations.

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Two-step immunotherapy brings promise in advanced ovarian cancer

admin — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:45:20 +0000

WASHINGTON DC—A new type of immunotherapy has helped patients with advanced ovarian cancer who had no other therapeutic options. In a study reported to the 2013 conference of the American Association for Cancer Research Dr Lana Kandalaft from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia explained this was the first time a combination of dendritic cell vaccination and adoptive T-cell therapy had been used in ovarian cancer and that it was successful, even producing a complete remission in one patient and had few — if any — side effects. She discussed the therapy with Peter Goodwin.

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Blood test for free tumour DNA could guide breast cancer therapy

admin — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:37:09 +0000

CAMBRIDGE, UK—A new blood test promises quicker assessment of treatment efficacy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. Dr Dana Tsui and colleagues from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, report in the New England Journal of Medicine that circulating tumour DNA is a more powerful marker of breast cancer progression than using blood tests for cancer cells or antigens, and raises the possibility of screening the effectiveness of drugs in days rather than months needed to wait for a change in radiological appearance.

Circulating free tumour DNA test could guide breast cancer therapy

admin — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:33:52 +0000

CAMBRIDGE, UK—A new blood test promises quicker assessment of treatment efficacy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. Dr Dana Tsui and colleagues from the Cancer Research UK Institute at Cambridge University report in the New England Journal of Medicine that circulating tumour DNA is a more powerful marker of breast cancer progression than using blood tests for cancer cells or antigens, and raises the possibility of screening the effectiveness of drugs in days rather than months needed to wait for a change in radiological appearance. She discusses the clinical implications with Peter Goodwin, who heard also from Dr Marc Lippman from the University of Miami — writer of the editorial comment on this paper.

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