Articles

As new biomarkers are identified to classify disease and customize treatments to individual needs, Supreme Court legal battles are in process to determine whether a private company can own the rights to a particular biomarker.

Recently, the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) advised eliminating routine prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer in healthy men. According to results of a survey by Johns Hopkins researchers, the new recommendations are likely to meet serious resistance from primary care physicians. Study results were published online in the journal Cancer.

A new type of anticancer drug, BP-1-102, has been created by a University of Hawaii Cancer Center team. The oral drug targets a key protein that causes the development of many types of cancer, including breast, lung, and skin cancers.

The development of BP-1-102 was conducted by a computer-based molecular analysis of the cancer-causing Stat 3 protein.

As the baby boomers age, it’s expected that the number of Americans suffering from blindness will increase 70% by the year 2020. A new design and prototype for a prescription medicine pill bottle has been developed. It is intended to not only have universal appeal but also to fill the special needs for the currently more than 1.3 million Americans who are legally blind.

The new design features:

The best strategy for management of low-tumor-burden follicular lymphoma (FL) following response to induction therapy is controversial. The phase 3 RESORT study compared maintenance rituximab therapy versus rituximab retreatment at disease progression, and results suggest that retreatment is the preferred approach. The study was presented at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology. The strategies achieved a similar time to treatment failure (TTTF) in this FL patient population, with no difference in quality of life or anxiety at 12 months.

Oral nutritional interventions do increase nutritional intake and result in weight gain in some malnourished patients with cancer as well as improve some aspects of quality of life (QOL), but do not seem to increase survival, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature (Baldwin C, et al. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2012;104:371-385).

Pazopanib, an angiogenesis inhibitor, achieved meaningful responses in about three-quarters of patients with refractory urothelial cancer in preliminary clinical trial results presented at a press briefing during the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Chicago, Illinois.

A specific subgroup of women with early-stage breast cancer may be able to avoid adjuvant radiation, according to a presentation at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) held in Chicago, Illinois. Women with the luminal A subtype of breast cancer, particularly those older than age 60, had fewer local recurrences at 10 years when treated with tamoxifen alone versus tamoxifen plus radiation therapy in a post hoc analysis of a randomized trial that compared these 2 forms of treatment.

A large, population-based study found that a significant proportion of female cancer survivors had poor health behaviors compared with women who have not had cancer (Rausch SM, et al. Am J Clin Oncol. 2012;35:22-31).

Failure of remission-induction therapy in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), although rare, can lead to highly adverse outcomes, but outcomes differ according to type of ALL: B-cell or T-cell, as well as other characteristics (Schrapps M, et al. N Engl J Med. 2012;366:1371-1381).