Dendreon breast cancer drug Neuvenge effective in trial

Dendreon Corp., the developer of a treatment to stimulate the immune system against prostate cancer, said a small study suggests the same technique may help women with breast cancer.
A clinical trial of Neuvenge showed that four of 18 patients taking the treatment, or 22 percent, had their tumors shrink or stabilize, according to results published in the Aug. 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The Seattle-based company, which has no marketed products, lost almost $1 billion of its market value May 9, when its leading drug candidate, Provenge, was delayed by a request from U.S. regulators for more proof that it works. Dendreon presented early results for Neuvenge, its only other drug in human testing, at a scientific meeting in March 2004. The company hasn't invested since in any large clinical trials needed for approval. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

New breast-cancer drug Exemestane

Government drug-buying agency Pharmac has approved funding for a new drug for breast-cancer sufferers. Pharmac medical director Dr Peter Moodie said exemestane would be fully funded under a deal with pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Exemestane, an aromatase inhibitor drug, can help to block the growth of hormone-dependent tumours by lowering the amount of oestrogen hormone in the body. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

Breast Cancer Surgery May Do Harm

Primum non nocere, or “first do no harm,” is an oft-repeated maxim of western medicine. But a paper by a Harvard Medical School (HMS) researcher presents new support for the possibility that breast cancer surgeons may be unintentionally doing just that. The paper, published in the International Journal of Surgery, hypothesizes that African-American women are more likely to die of breast cancer because they are more likely to undergo surgery at a young age to remove cancerous tumors. That surgery may in fact exacerbate the cancer by unleashing agents into the body, inflaming previously dormant tumors elsewhere. “Sometimes surgery to remove a primary tumor can kick-start a dormant disease,” said Lecturer on Surgery Michael W. Retsky, the paper’s chief author. Doctors have long observed an increased likelihood of relapse among breast cancer patients in the two years after a tumor is surgically removed. In a 2005 paper, Retsky and his fellow researchers first proposed that surgery itself might be a cause of the relapse. In that paper, Retsky found that age was the decisive factor: pre-menopausal women were significantly more likely to experience relapses after surgery than post-menopausal women were. His new paper applies this theory to another apparent trend—the high mortality rates among African-American women afflicted with breast cancer. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

Gene profiling predicts resistance to breast cancer drug Herceptin

Using gene chips to profile tumors before treatment, researchers at Harvard and Yale Universities found markers that identified breast cancer subtypes resistant to Herceptin, the primary treatment for HER2-positive breast cancer. They say this advance could help further refine therapy for the 25 to 30 percent of breast cancer patients with this class of tumor. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

Medical Breakthrough -- Radiation Seeds for Breast Cancer

Radiation treatment is often necessary for breast cancer patients to ensure remaining cancer cells don't come back after a lumpectomy. It can be painful, time consuming, and emotionally and physically draining. Tonight's medical breakthrough shows us how a new therapy cuts treatment time from several weeks to one day. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

Lapatinib plus Capecitabine for HER2-Positive Advanced Breast Cancer

Lapatinib plus capecitabine is superior to capecitabine alone in women with HER2-positive advanced breast cancer that has progressed after treatment with regimens that included an anthracycline, a taxane, and trastuzumab. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

Tamoxifen Has Late Effect in Preventing Breast Cancer

Tamoxifen is associated with a highly significant reduction in the incidence of estrogen receptor-positive invasive breast cancer that predominantly occurs after the 8-year treatment period, according to long-term follow-up results from the Royal Marsden Tamoxifen Breast Cancer Prevention Trial."This late effect indicates a preventative rather than a treatment effect on established occult disease," said Trevor J. Powles, MD, emeritus professor of breast oncology, Institute of Cancer Research, and lead clinician, Parkside Oncology Centre, London, United Kingdom. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

Epigenetic drugs, promising for breast cancer treatment

Worldwide, cancer persists as one of the most important diseases that affect the human being. The knowledge on the molecular bases of cancer generated during the last decades has been successfully translated into small but significant gains in overall cancer survival rates due to better primary prevention measures, improved diagnostic methods and the development of more effective and specific therapies, collectively termed "molecular targeted therapies". In the context of these new forms of treatment, epigenetic or transcriptional cancer therapy is clearly promising. Epigenetics refers to the function of DNA that does not depend on the coding DNA sequence itself but on the accessory molecules and mechanisms affected by DNA. It is known that epigenetic alterations are equally if not more important than classical genetic alterations to disrupt the function of tumour suppressor genes. The two most studied epigenetic aberrations common to all types of cancer are DNA hypermethylation and histone deacetylation, which cooperate to silence the expression of tumour suppressor genes, just as gene mutations and gene deletions do. The big difference between these two alternative ways that tumour cells use to inactivate tumour suppressor genes is that, while the reversal of genetic alterations is technically almost unfeasible in clinical scenarios, the function of these epigenetically inactivated suppressor genes is easily reactivated by pharmacological means. In this inaugural issue of PLoS ONE, Dr. Dueñas-Gonzalez's group from the Instituto de Investi gaciones Biomédicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología, Mexico, demonstrate, for the first time, that a combination of a DNA methylation and a histone deacetylase inhibitor, can reactivate the expression of more than a thousand genes in primary tumours of breast cancer patients. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

U.S. breast-cancer guidelines updated

The U.S. national guidelines for treating breast cancer have been updated to reflect new technology, a cancer group said Wednesday. One change is that Eli Lilly's Evista (raloxifene) is now recommended for use in reducing the risk of invasive breast cancer in postmenopausal women with lobular carcinoma in situ, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network said in a statement Wednesday. The update is based on positive results from the NSABP Study of Tamoxifen and Raloxifene (STAR) trial, the group said. The NCCN further advised that, when a breast MRI is indicated, the test should be performed and interpreted by an expert breast-imaging team working in concert with the multidisciplinary treatment team. The revised guidelines also contain advice on incorporating Genentech's Herceptin (trastuzumab) as an adjuvant treatment for HER2-positive breast cancer and recommend that current treatments now used in the adjuvant setting also be considered for the neoadjuvant setting. The NCCN is a non-profit alliance comprised of 20 of the world's leading cancer centers. --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--

North American Scientific gets FDA nod for breast cancer device

Radiation therapy products developer North American Scientific Inc. (NASI.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it received U.S. regulatory marketing approval for its high-dose rate radiation treatment design of ClearPath, a breast cancer treatment device. The company had received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market the low-dose rate system in April. (Reporting by Ankur Relia in Bangalore) --Click the title of this post to read the full article from its source--