Cancer, Cancer Treatment

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 7 — Digoxin, a drug used for many years to treat irregular heart rhythms and heart failure, may also be a cancer-fighting agent, researchers report.

Cancer cells need to create new blood vessels to survive. But many of these cells are oxygen-deprived and need to switch on genes that produce a protein called hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF-1), which help cells survive in low-oxygen conditions.

Digoxin reduces HIF-1, causing cancer cells to die, the scientists from Johns Hopkins University found.

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THURSDAY, Jan. 8 — After nearly a year of review, U.S. health officials said Thursday that they supported the continued use of the controversial cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said there was no significant difference in carotid artery thickness between patients taking Vytorin and patients taking the drug Zocor.

But, the agency reported, the levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol decreased by 56 percent in the Vytorin group compared to 39 percent for the Zocor group.

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WEDNESDAY, Oct. 22 — A new study suggests that people with advanced colon cancer who have a particular gene mutation won’t benefit from the medication cetuximab (Erbitux).

While the drug can add months to the lives of people without a mutation in a gene called K-ras, those who have the mutation won’t see any benefit from this additional therapy, reports the study, which is published in the Oct. 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

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By Michael Kahn

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have figured out why some women develop resistance to the most commonly used breast cancer drug, something that raises the risk their tumors will return, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The findings could lead to new tests to determine which women are not likely to benefit from tamoxifen and who should be given other drugs, said Jason Carroll of Cancer Research UK in Cambridge, who led the study published in the journal Nature.

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(Ivanhoe Newswire) — A promising drug for treatment of colorectal cancer may not be effective in 40 percent of patients with the cancer, new research shows.

Analysis of a recent study shows when given the drug cetuximab (Erbitux), metastatic colorectal cancer patients with tumors showing the “normal” type of a gene called K-ras survived longer whereas those with a mutated form of the gene did not. More specifically, patients with normal K-ras tumors who received cetuximab showed an almost two-fold improvement in overall survival and progression-free survival compared to similar patients who received supportive care alone. Those with mutated K-ras tumors who received the drug showed no significant improvement compared to similar patients who received supportive care alone.

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The drug Tarceva, made by OSI Pharmaceuticals has been found to cause an increase in survival rates in lung cancer patients when the drug is administered after chemotherapy treatments. The chief executive officer of the company, Colin Goddard, was pleased to announce the results. This drug may be the first in a wave of new treatments for cancer.

This drug works by stopping the growth of non small cell cancer cells, which then slows and even eliminates the cancer?s spread throughout the body. The study involved 889 patients who were given at least four cycles chemotherapy and were then treated with either once-daily Tarceva or a placebo if the disease did not progress during chemotherapy.

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By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Combining two chemotherapy drugs with two targeted therapies was safe and appeared to help patients with advanced lung cancer live longer, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

The combination of Roche and Co’s Avastin, ImClone’s Erbitux, carboplatin and paclitaxel appeared to add an average of two months to the lives of patients, from 12 months on average to 14 months, the team at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center said.

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(Ivanhoe Newswire) — A promising drug for treatment of colorectal cancer may not be effective in 40 percent of patients with the cancer, new research shows.

Analysis of a recent study shows when given the drug cetuximab (Erbitux), metastatic colorectal cancer patients with tumors showing the “normal” type of a gene called K-ras survived longer whereas those with a mutated form of the gene did not. More specifically, patients with normal K-ras tumors who received cetuximab showed an almost two-fold improvement in overall survival and progression-free survival compared to similar patients who received supportive care alone. Those with mutated K-ras tumors who received the drug showed no significant improvement compared to similar patients who received supportive care alone.

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A new era of intelligent cancer drug development has spurred a leap in the proportion of drugs reaching patients, according to a study by Cancer Research UK scientists published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

Scientists obtained data on 974 cancer drugs in clinical development, and calculated that there was a probability that 18 per cent of those entering the clinic would make it to market. Previously it was estimated that in some studies only five per cent of cancer drugs in the pipeline become standard treatments for the disease.

A promising anticancer drug developed by the Christus Stehlin Foundation for Cancer Research in Houston is being tested on patients after quickly receiving approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for Phase I clinical trials.

Generally, only five potential anticancer drugs out of every 5,000 to 10,000 developed are approved by the FDA for Phase 1 trials.

The drug, CZ48, is derived from a Chinese tree, Camptotheca, whose anticancer potential was discovered in the 1960s.

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