The high cost of cancer treatments is a huge topic of conversation these days. One way to trim those costs is to not give treatments to people who don’t need them.
That sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s a huge problem, and it’s at the heart of the current debate over the nationwide practice of screening large swaths of people for cancer when they don’t have any symptoms.
When Milton Wright III got his third cancer diagnosis, he cried until he laughed. He was 20 and had survived leukemia twice before, first when he was eight and again as a teen. Each time he’d suffered through years of punishing chemotherapy.
But now he had checked himself in to Seattle Children’s Hospital. An aspiring model, he had taken a fall before a photo shoot and found he couldn’t shake off the pain in his ribs. When the doctors started preparing him for a spinal tap, he knew the cancer was back. “I said, Oh, man, they are going to tell me I relapsed again,” he recalls. “They’re going to give me my six months.”
El cáncer de mama es una de las principales causas de muerte en mujeres en países desarrollados. Este término engloba realmente distintas patologías desde el punto de vista de las características moleculares, el desarrollo de la enfermedad, el pronóstico de las pacientes y su tratamiento. Existe un subtipo de cáncer de mama que se caracteriza por presentar elevados niveles de la proteína HER2. Esta proteína desencadena respuestas en las células tumorales que llevan a su proliferación y supervivencia. Desde hace algo más de una década, las pacientes con este tipo de tumores reciben como tratamiento un medicamento (Trastuzumab/Herceptin) que bloquea selectivamente a HER2, frenando así las respuestas protumorales que induce esta proteína.
Experts from the European Food Safey Authority (EFSA) have confirmed previous conclusions that acrylamide, a chemical substance formed when heating foods like potato chips, barbecued meat, and bread, potentially increases the risk of developing cancer.
EFSA's Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain (CONTAM) said it stood by a draft opinion, published in July last year, which concluded on an increased risk of cancer caused by acrylamide.
Over the past year, EFSA held a public consultation to improve its scientific opinion on acrylomide, but left its conclusions unchanged, the agency announced on Thursday (4 June).
Clinical trials of a new drug cocktail have been shown to cure 58 percent of terminally-ill patients by shrinking cancerous tumors or eliminating them altogether. The scientific community is hailing this discovery as a major breakthrough in cancer research.
The new cocktail is a form of immunotherapy, a relatively new class of drugs that harness the body’s immune system to extinguish fatal tumors. Israeli researcher Prof. Jacob Schachter, who took part in the development of the drug and in the recent clinical trials, told Israel’s Channel 10 that the newfound drug cocktail could serve as the basis of treatment for many types of cancer, potentially replacing chemotherapy. “It’s an explosion,” he said.
Armune Bioscience, the Kalamazoo-based cancer diagnostic startup, has developed what it calls “the world’s only tumor-specific, non-PSA blood test designed to help doctors detect prostate cancer.” Called Apifiny, the test is now available nationally as the company works to get the word out to clinicians that it believes it has developed a better way to discover the presence of prostate cancer.
En Allemagne, 200.000 personnes sont touchées chaque année par un cancer de la peau. Le mélanome est le plus grave de ces cancers. Seuls des examens de dépistage réguliers peuvent permettre un diagnostic précoce. Pour cela, les médecins examinent à l'aide d'un dermatoscope (un microscope permettant d'observer les couches les plus profondes de la peau) la taille et la texture des grains de beauté atypiques des patients, et observent leur évolution au cours du temps. Il s'agit d'une procédure chronophage, et il peut être difficile d'évaluer avec précision la croissance d'un grain de beauté entre deux examens.
A new technology developed in Israel that uses an algorithm to screen blood samples from existing medical records may revolutionize the diagnosis of colon cancer and potentially save millions of lives.
Maccabi Health Services, together with researchers from Israeli start-up Medial Research, recently unveiled the new technology that uses a formula to analyze the results of standard blood tests to predict the likelihood of colon cancer years before the disease is detected.
The algorithm requires lab results that are a part of standard medical records and its prediction relies on math rather than advanced testing technology.
Immuno-oncology is all the rage these days, and it’s easy to see why. Breakthroughs in harnessing the power of our body’s natural defenses are unlocking new ways to fight cancer, and producing some of the most promising results the field has seen to date.
