Medical News Today: Oncology News

Researchers have discovered an enzyme crucial to a type of DNA repair that also causes resistance to a class of cancer drugs most commonly used against ovarian cancer...

Surgeons at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine continue to advance minimally-invasive surgery for cancer patients by reducing the number of abdominal incisions from approximately six to a single small incision...

Allos Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTH) announced topline results from the Company's randomized Phase 2b investigational trial of FOLOTYN® (pralatrexate injection) versus erlotinib in patients with Stage IIIB/IV (advanced) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who had received one or two prior systemic treatments including at least one prior platinum-based regimen...

ArQule, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARQL) announced the initiation of a Phase 2, single agent trial with ARQ 197 in gastric cancer by Kyowa Hakko Kirin, its exclusive licensee for the development and commercialization of ARQ 197 in the Asian territory consisting of Japan, China (including Hong Kong), South Korea and Taiwan...

Australia's next government must close a yawning gap in the nation's cancer control response by committing now to fully implementing the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program before more lives are lost unnecessarily, Cancer Council Australia said today...

Etubics Corporation, a biopharmaceutical company developing "next generation" vector vaccines, has entered into Phase I trials at Duke University with its ETBX-011, a therapeutic vaccine candidate that is intended to treat Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA)-expressing cancers such as colorectal cancer. Etubics dosed its first patient yesterday. Etubics was recently granted clearance by the U.S...

The University of Houston (UH) received a $2.4 million grant to fund the most promising young cancer researchers who are working at the cutting-edge of a new multidisciplinary approach to fighting cancer. The award is part of the latest round of grant disbursements from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), which oversees the state's new billion-dollar war on cancer...

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) has been awarded two individual $2 million grants from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to support clinical studies of ofatumumab (Arzerra®, GlaxoSmithKline) in the treatment of hematologic malignancies and pazopanib (Votrient®, GlaxoSmithKline) in the treatment of solid tumors...

With a recent first of its kind surgery, physicians at Mayo Clinic in Arizona have developed a new surgical procedure for the treatment of prostate cancer using natural orifices - signaling the next step in the evolution of minimally invasive surgery. Removing the prostate is a common treatment for patients with prostate cancer, which affects one in six men in the U.S...

Abraxis BioScience, Inc. (NASDAQ:ABII), a fully integrated, global biotechnology company, and Specialised Therapeutics Ltd. today announced that MEDSAFE, the New Zealand Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Authority, has approved for marketing ABRAXANE® (nanoparticle albumin-bound paclitaxel) for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer after failure of anthracycline therapy...

Grown-ups aren't the only ones making exciting scientific discoveries these days. Two middle school students from Wisconsin joined a team of scientists who are reporting the first glimpse of the innermost structure of a key bacterial enzyme. It helps activate certain antibiotics and anti-cancer agents so that those substances do their job. Their study appears in ACS' weekly journal Biochemistry...

Men who develop prostate cancer, especially the more aggressive and dangerous forms that spread throughout the body, tend to retain denser bones as they age than men who stay free of the disease, suggests new research from Johns Hopkins and the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health...

Organ transplant patients who develop cancer may be helped by a treatment that uses blood cells to attack their tumour. University of Edinburgh researchers have generated a bank of white blood cells from healthy blood donors to treat patients with a blood cancer called post transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD)...

Scientists from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit at the University of Edinburgh have discovered a potential new way to treat a common form of breast cancer which affects 800 Scottish women and 9,000 UK women each year. The team are the first to identify a gene's key role in causing the spread of HER2 positive breast cancer to other parts of the body...

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco propose that treatments used on liver cancers beyond the established Milan criteria for liver transplantation may be appropriate for all patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who are listed for transplantation...

Current research suggests that taking morphine can block new blood vessel and tumor growth. The related report by Koodie et al, "Morphine suppresses tumor angiogenesis through a HIF1α/p38MAPK pathway," appears in the August 2010 issue of the American Journal of Pathology. Morphine is currently the gold standard of analgesics used to relieve severe pain and suffering...

Synta Pharmaceuticals Corp...

In Germany, several national health campaigns promote cancer screening by announcing that only one in five German men gets screened. This is supposed to motivate men to have an examination...

As hospital and clinical laboratories endure increasingly intense pressures to do more with less, they now face another challenge - rising demand for medical tests driven by an aging U.S. population that is expected to swell to more than 70 million in the next 20 years, an increase of more than 80 percent from today...

Rituximab (MabThera, Roche Products) will now be routinely available to certain NHS patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, thanks to final guidance published today (28 July). The NHS has three months to begin implementing this new guidance...