Food that fight Fatigue

A heavy or fatty meal — think Thanksgiving dinner — can make you tired. Some foods or eating strategies do just the opposite. Candy and other simple sugars give you a quick burst of energy — but that boost fades quickly and can leave you feeling depleted and wanting to eat more. On the other hand, whole grains and healthy unsaturated fats supply the reserves you can draw on throughout the day. So to keep your energy up and steady, limit refined sugar and starches.

New Drug Benefits Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer

The drug cabazitaxel improved the survival of some patients with advanced prostate cancer compared with those who received standard chemotherapy, according to results  from a randomized phase III clinical trial presented March 5, 2010, at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium  in San Francisco. Although the benefit was modest (several months), there currently are no effective treatments for patients with this form of the disease, called metastatic castration-resistant, or hormone-refractory, prostate cancer. These results led toFDA approval of cabazitaxel on June 17, 2010, for men with this type of prostate cancer. The study results were published October 2, 2010, in Lancet.

“This is the first positive study of its kind,” said Nicholas Vogelzang, M.D., chair and medical director of the Developmental Therapeutics Committee of the company US Oncology, who moderated a press briefing on March 3 ahead of the symposium. Cabazitaxel should clearly be considered now as an alternative for men in whom standard chemotherapy has failed, he added.

The international TROPIC (Treatment of Hormone-Refractory Metastatic Prostate Cancer Previously Treated with a Taxotere-Containing Regimen) study included 755 men whose prostate cancers had progressed despite treatment with hormone therapy and subsequent chemotherapy with docetaxel, which is the standard drug used to treat men with advanced disease. The participants were randomly assigned to receive cabazitaxel plus prednisone or another chemotherapy drug, mitoxantrone, also in combination with prednisone.

With a median follow-up of 12.8 months, median overall survival for men in the cabazitaxel group was 15.1 months compared with 12.7 months for patients in the mitoxantrone group. This translates into about a 30 percent reduction in the risk of death, said lead investigator Oliver Sartor, M.D., of the Tulane Cancer Center.

Cabazitaxel—which, like docetaxel, is part of a class of drugs known as taxanes—was designed to be active in cells that develop resistance to docetaxel, which happens in many patients with this disease. The drug appears to elude a mechanism in prostate cancer cells that pumps anticancer drugs out of the cells before they have a chance to be effective, the researchers said.

The improvement in overall survival was consistent across different patient subgroups, such as those stratified by age, race, and certain co-morbidities, Dr. Sartor said. And men treated with cabazitaxel also had improvements in important measures such as length of survival without tumor growth (progression-free survival) and significant tumor shrinkage following treatment (response rate).

In terms of side effects, patients who received cabazitaxel were more likely to experience febrile neutropenia, a high fever associated with significant reductions in white blood cells called neutrophils. So, Dr. Sartor advised, patients treated with cabazitaxel need to be “carefully watched” for this toxicity.

Because there is no well-accepted standard treatment for men whose tumors no longer respond to docetaxel, choosing the treatment with which cabazitaxel would be compared was difficult, Dr. Sartor noted. Mitoxantrone was chosen instead of a placebo because it has some activity in these types of patients, he explained.

“It’s a promising feature that you can treat patients with a taxane-based chemotherapy in a second-line setting and still have a response and reasonable tolerance,” said Daniel George, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine and urologic surgery at the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center. And patients who respond well to first-line treatment with docetaxel tend to fare better with second- and third-line therapies, Dr. George added. “So, for those patients this may be even more of an advance.”

The results also further confirm that in patients with advanced prostate cancer, chemotherapy isn’t strictly a last ditch treatment, Dr. George said, but that it “can really extend survival even further than we originally recognized.”

Noting that advances in treating cancer have always been incremental, Dr. Vogelzang said that the results were similar to those from the 2004 study that demonstrated the benefit of docetaxel as treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

The third annual symposium was co-sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, and the Society of Urologic Oncology.

Adapted from the NCI Cancer Bulletin

New Drug Benefits Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer

The drug cabazitaxel improved the survival of some patients with advanced prostate cancer compared with those who received standard chemotherapy, according to results  from a randomized phase III clinical trial presented March 5, 2010, at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium  in San Francisco. Although the benefit was modest (several months), there currently are no effective treatments for patients with this form of the disease, called metastatic castration-resistant, or hormone-refractory, prostate cancer. These results led toFDA approval of cabazitaxel on June 17, 2010, for men with this type of prostate cancer. The study results were published October 2, 2010, in Lancet.

“This is the first positive study of its kind,” said Nicholas Vogelzang, M.D., chair and medical director of the Developmental Therapeutics Committee of the company US Oncology, who moderated a press briefing on March 3 ahead of the symposium. Cabazitaxel should clearly be considered now as an alternative for men in whom standard chemotherapy has failed, he added.

The international TROPIC (Treatment of Hormone-Refractory Metastatic Prostate Cancer Previously Treated with a Taxotere-Containing Regimen) study included 755 men whose prostate cancers had progressed despite treatment with hormone therapy and subsequent chemotherapy with docetaxel, which is the standard drug used to treat men with advanced disease. The participants were randomly assigned to receive cabazitaxel plus prednisone or another chemotherapy drug, mitoxantrone, also in combination with prednisone.

With a median follow-up of 12.8 months, median overall survival for men in the cabazitaxel group was 15.1 months compared with 12.7 months for patients in the mitoxantrone group. This translates into about a 30 percent reduction in the risk of death, said lead investigator Oliver Sartor, M.D., of the Tulane Cancer Center.

Cabazitaxel—which, like docetaxel, is part of a class of drugs known as taxanes—was designed to be active in cells that develop resistance to docetaxel, which happens in many patients with this disease. The drug appears to elude a mechanism in prostate cancer cells that pumps anticancer drugs out of the cells before they have a chance to be effective, the researchers said.

The improvement in overall survival was consistent across different patient subgroups, such as those stratified by age, race, and certain co-morbidities, Dr. Sartor said. And men treated with cabazitaxel also had improvements in important measures such as length of survival without tumor growth (progression-free survival) and significant tumor shrinkage following treatment (response rate).

In terms of side effects, patients who received cabazitaxel were more likely to experience febrile neutropenia, a high fever associated with significant reductions in white blood cells called neutrophils. So, Dr. Sartor advised, patients treated with cabazitaxel need to be “carefully watched” for this toxicity.

Because there is no well-accepted standard treatment for men whose tumors no longer respond to docetaxel, choosing the treatment with which cabazitaxel would be compared was difficult, Dr. Sartor noted. Mitoxantrone was chosen instead of a placebo because it has some activity in these types of patients, he explained.

“It’s a promising feature that you can treat patients with a taxane-based chemotherapy in a second-line setting and still have a response and reasonable tolerance,” said Daniel George, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine and urologic surgery at the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center. And patients who respond well to first-line treatment with docetaxel tend to fare better with second- and third-line therapies, Dr. George added. “So, for those patients this may be even more of an advance.”

The results also further confirm that in patients with advanced prostate cancer, chemotherapy isn’t strictly a last ditch treatment, Dr. George said, but that it “can really extend survival even further than we originally recognized.”

Noting that advances in treating cancer have always been incremental, Dr. Vogelzang said that the results were similar to those from the 2004 study that demonstrated the benefit of docetaxel as treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

The third annual symposium was co-sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, and the Society of Urologic Oncology.

Adapted from the NCI Cancer Bulletin

New Drug Benefits Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer

The drug cabazitaxel improved the survival of some patients with advanced prostate cancer compared with those who received standard chemotherapy, according to results  from a randomized phase III clinical trial presented March 5, 2010, at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium  in San Francisco. Although the benefit was modest (several months), there currently are no effective treatments for patients with this form of the disease, called metastatic castration-resistant, or hormone-refractory, prostate cancer. These results led toFDA approval of cabazitaxel on June 17, 2010, for men with this type of prostate cancer. The study results were published October 2, 2010, in Lancet.

“This is the first positive study of its kind,” said Nicholas Vogelzang, M.D., chair and medical director of the Developmental Therapeutics Committee of the company US Oncology, who moderated a press briefing on March 3 ahead of the symposium. Cabazitaxel should clearly be considered now as an alternative for men in whom standard chemotherapy has failed, he added.

The international TROPIC (Treatment of Hormone-Refractory Metastatic Prostate Cancer Previously Treated with a Taxotere-Containing Regimen) study included 755 men whose prostate cancers had progressed despite treatment with hormone therapy and subsequent chemotherapy with docetaxel, which is the standard drug used to treat men with advanced disease. The participants were randomly assigned to receive cabazitaxel plus prednisone or another chemotherapy drug, mitoxantrone, also in combination with prednisone.

With a median follow-up of 12.8 months, median overall survival for men in the cabazitaxel group was 15.1 months compared with 12.7 months for patients in the mitoxantrone group. This translates into about a 30 percent reduction in the risk of death, said lead investigator Oliver Sartor, M.D., of the Tulane Cancer Center.

Cabazitaxel—which, like docetaxel, is part of a class of drugs known as taxanes—was designed to be active in cells that develop resistance to docetaxel, which happens in many patients with this disease. The drug appears to elude a mechanism in prostate cancer cells that pumps anticancer drugs out of the cells before they have a chance to be effective, the researchers said.

The improvement in overall survival was consistent across different patient subgroups, such as those stratified by age, race, and certain co-morbidities, Dr. Sartor said. And men treated with cabazitaxel also had improvements in important measures such as length of survival without tumor growth (progression-free survival) and significant tumor shrinkage following treatment (response rate).

In terms of side effects, patients who received cabazitaxel were more likely to experience febrile neutropenia, a high fever associated with significant reductions in white blood cells called neutrophils. So, Dr. Sartor advised, patients treated with cabazitaxel need to be “carefully watched” for this toxicity.

Because there is no well-accepted standard treatment for men whose tumors no longer respond to docetaxel, choosing the treatment with which cabazitaxel would be compared was difficult, Dr. Sartor noted. Mitoxantrone was chosen instead of a placebo because it has some activity in these types of patients, he explained.

“It’s a promising feature that you can treat patients with a taxane-based chemotherapy in a second-line setting and still have a response and reasonable tolerance,” said Daniel George, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine and urologic surgery at the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center. And patients who respond well to first-line treatment with docetaxel tend to fare better with second- and third-line therapies, Dr. George added. “So, for those patients this may be even more of an advance.”

The results also further confirm that in patients with advanced prostate cancer, chemotherapy isn’t strictly a last ditch treatment, Dr. George said, but that it “can really extend survival even further than we originally recognized.”

Noting that advances in treating cancer have always been incremental, Dr. Vogelzang said that the results were similar to those from the 2004 study that demonstrated the benefit of docetaxel as treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

The third annual symposium was co-sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, and the Society of Urologic Oncology.

Adapted from the NCI Cancer Bulletin

New Drug Benefits Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer

The drug cabazitaxel improved the survival of some patients with advanced prostate cancer compared with those who received standard chemotherapy, according to results  from a randomized phase III clinical trial presented March 5, 2010, at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium  in San Francisco. Although the benefit was modest (several months), there currently are no effective treatments for patients with this form of the disease, called metastatic castration-resistant, or hormone-refractory, prostate cancer. These results led toFDA approval of cabazitaxel on June 17, 2010, for men with this type of prostate cancer. The study results were published October 2, 2010, in Lancet.

“This is the first positive study of its kind,” said Nicholas Vogelzang, M.D., chair and medical director of the Developmental Therapeutics Committee of the company US Oncology, who moderated a press briefing on March 3 ahead of the symposium. Cabazitaxel should clearly be considered now as an alternative for men in whom standard chemotherapy has failed, he added.

The international TROPIC (Treatment of Hormone-Refractory Metastatic Prostate Cancer Previously Treated with a Taxotere-Containing Regimen) study included 755 men whose prostate cancers had progressed despite treatment with hormone therapy and subsequent chemotherapy with docetaxel, which is the standard drug used to treat men with advanced disease. The participants were randomly assigned to receive cabazitaxel plus prednisone or another chemotherapy drug, mitoxantrone, also in combination with prednisone.

With a median follow-up of 12.8 months, median overall survival for men in the cabazitaxel group was 15.1 months compared with 12.7 months for patients in the mitoxantrone group. This translates into about a 30 percent reduction in the risk of death, said lead investigator Oliver Sartor, M.D., of the Tulane Cancer Center.

Cabazitaxel—which, like docetaxel, is part of a class of drugs known as taxanes—was designed to be active in cells that develop resistance to docetaxel, which happens in many patients with this disease. The drug appears to elude a mechanism in prostate cancer cells that pumps anticancer drugs out of the cells before they have a chance to be effective, the researchers said.

The improvement in overall survival was consistent across different patient subgroups, such as those stratified by age, race, and certain co-morbidities, Dr. Sartor said. And men treated with cabazitaxel also had improvements in important measures such as length of survival without tumor growth (progression-free survival) and significant tumor shrinkage following treatment (response rate).

In terms of side effects, patients who received cabazitaxel were more likely to experience febrile neutropenia, a high fever associated with significant reductions in white blood cells called neutrophils. So, Dr. Sartor advised, patients treated with cabazitaxel need to be “carefully watched” for this toxicity.

Because there is no well-accepted standard treatment for men whose tumors no longer respond to docetaxel, choosing the treatment with which cabazitaxel would be compared was difficult, Dr. Sartor noted. Mitoxantrone was chosen instead of a placebo because it has some activity in these types of patients, he explained.

“It’s a promising feature that you can treat patients with a taxane-based chemotherapy in a second-line setting and still have a response and reasonable tolerance,” said Daniel George, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine and urologic surgery at the Duke University Comprehensive Cancer Center. And patients who respond well to first-line treatment with docetaxel tend to fare better with second- and third-line therapies, Dr. George added. “So, for those patients this may be even more of an advance.”

The results also further confirm that in patients with advanced prostate cancer, chemotherapy isn’t strictly a last ditch treatment, Dr. George said, but that it “can really extend survival even further than we originally recognized.”

Noting that advances in treating cancer have always been incremental, Dr. Vogelzang said that the results were similar to those from the 2004 study that demonstrated the benefit of docetaxel as treatment for advanced prostate cancer.

The third annual symposium was co-sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Radiation Oncology, and the Society of Urologic Oncology.

Adapted from the NCI Cancer Bulletin

Tumor Cells In Mice Destroyed By Drug From Mediterranean Weed

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, working with Danish researchers, have developed a novel anticancer drug designed to travel - undetected by normal cells - through the bloodstream until activated by specific cancer proteins. The drug, made from a weedlike plant, has been shown to destroy cancers and their direct blood supplies, acting like a "molecular grenade," and sparing healthy blood vessels and tissues. 

In laboratory studies, researchers said they found that a three-day course of the drug, called G202, reduced the size of human prostate tumors grown in mice by an average of 50 percent within 30 days. In a direct comparison, G202 outperformed the chemotherapy drug docetaxel, reducing seven of nine human prostate tumors in mice by more than 50 percent in 21 days. Docetaxel reduced one of eight human prostate tumors in mice by more than 50 percent in the same time period. 

In a report in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researchers also reported that G202 produced at least 50 percent regression in models of human breast cancer, kidney cancer and bladder cancer. 

Based on these results, Johns Hopkins physicians have performed a phase I clinical trial to assess safety of the drug and have thus far treated 29 patients with advanced cancer. In addition to Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas-San Antonio are participating in the trial. A phase II trial to test the drug in patients with prostate cancer and liver cancer is planned. 

The drug G202 is chemically derived from a weed called Thapsia garganica that grows naturally in the Mediterranean region. The plant makes a product, dubbed thapsigargin, that since the time of ancient Greece has been known to be toxic to animals. In Arab caravans, the plant was known as the "death carrot" because it would kill camels if they ate it, the researchers noted. 

"Our goal was to try to re-engineer this very toxic natural plant product into a drug we might use to treat human cancer," says lead study author Samuel Denmeade, M.D., professor of oncology, urology, pharmacology and molecular sciences. "We achieved this by creating a format that requires modification by cells to release the active drug." 

By disassembling thapsigargin and chemically modifying it, the researchers created a form that Denmeade likens to a hand grenade with an intact pin. The drug can be injected and can travel through the bloodstream until it finds the site of cancer cells and hits a protein called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). PSMA is released by cells lining tumors of the prostate and other areas, and in effect "pulls the pin" on G202, releasing cell-killing agents into the tumor and the blood vessels that feed it, as well as to other cells in the vicinity. Specifically, G202 blocks the function of a protein called the SERCA pump, a housekeeping protein necessary for cell survival that keeps the level of calcium in the cell at the correct level, the researchers report. 

"The exciting thing is that the cancer itself is activating its own demise," says senior study author John Isaacs, Ph.D., professor of oncology, urology, chemical and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins. 

Because the drug is targeted to the SERCA pump, which all cells need to stay alive, researchers say it will be difficult for tumor cells to become resistant to the drug, because they cannot stop making the protein. 

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Breast Cancer Risk Linked To Bra Size.

The same gene that can determine a woman’s breast size could also be linked to her odds of developing breast cancer, with larger cup-sizes more likely to develop tumors, according to the results of a new study California-based personal genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe.

The firm reported that they were able to identify “seven single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) significantly associated with breast size, including three SNPs also correlated with breast cancer,” according to CBS News reports. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Medical Genetics, marks the first time that a genetic correlation between breast size and the risk of developing breast cancer has been made.

In the study, the researchers contacted more than 16,000 women of European ancestry. Each study participant identified their bra size on a 10-point scale, ranging from smaller than AAA to larger than DDD, and also answered questions regarding their age, genetic ancestry, pregnancy history, breast surgery history, and breast feeding status, CBS News and Tamara Cohen of the Daily Mail reported.

The women were then grouped into 10 categories based on their cup sizes, and the researchers identified genome regions associated with differences in breast development, the UK National Health Service (NHS) explained.

The 23andMe scientists then compared those genome regions with those known to be associated with increased breast cancer risk, before conducting a secondary analysis of 29 DNA variations also linked to breast cancer and finding out whether or not those variations were also associated with breast size among the study group, the NHS added.

They found that two out of seven unique genome variations “significantly associated” with breast size were also associated with breast cancer, and a third variation, discovered in the secondary analysis, had a “possible association” but one that was not statistically significant.

“There are surprising connections between some of the genes involved in determining breast size and the genes involved in breast cancer,” lead author Nick Eriksson told The Huffington Post. However, he also emphasized that the link is somewhat “uncertain” and that “based on current knowledge, it’s not a strong risk factor” in terms of breast cancer development.

“While the precise relationships between breast size, density, obesity and breast cancer remain difficult to untangle, understanding the biology… may aid in the development of novel screening tools,” Eriksson added in a separate interview with the Daily Mail’s Cohen.

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online

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