That news comes from Dendreon, the company that makes Provenge.

“We believe this is truly a breakthrough for the prostate cancer community and a testament to the promise of the field of cancer immunotherapies,” Dendreon’s president and chief executive officer Mitchell Gold, MD, said in a conference call today.

Provenge is a biologic drug given by infusion to spur the immune system to fight advanced prostate cancer that doesn’t respond to anti-androgen treatment.

In 2007, an FDA advisory panel recommended that the FDA approve Provenge. But instead, the FDA requested more information about whether Provenge prolongs survival.

That request led to a new study of 512 men with advanced prostate cancer. Those men had metastatic, androgen-independent prostate cancer, meaning their cancer had spread and wasn’t responding to anti-androgen treatment.

In that study, overall survival was significantly better for men taking Provenge than those taking a placebo.

The study’s results were “unambiguous” and “very consistent” with previous Provenge trials, Gold says.

Dendreon plans to submit the study’s results to the FDA in the fourth quarter of 2009; after that, the FDA will have six months to review the material, Gold says.

“This data supports Provenge being used as front-line treatment in men with metastatic, androgen-independent prostate cancer,” says Gold, who notes that no new side effects from Provenge stood out in the study. In previous trials, the most common side effects in men taking Provenge were chills, fever, headache, fatigue, shortness of breath, vomiting, and tremor, mainly at a low level and for one to two days following infusion.

Gold says that those men would first have surgery or some form of local therapy, then anti-androgen therapy if their cancer recurred, and if their PSA levels rose after that, “Provenge would come into play as a potential treatment option for them.”

In men with prostate cancer, PSA (prostate-specific androgen) levels are used to gauge the success of prostate cancer treatment.

Dendreon isn’t releasing any further details of the study until April 28, when the findings will be presented at the American Urological Association’s annual meeting in Chicago.

The technology used to make Provenge may also prove useful against other forms of cancer, Gold says.

Prostate Cancer Vaccine Meets Goal

The figures mean that on average, a new cancer patient was being diagnosed in the country every 7 minutes, 10 seconds in 2006, up slightly from the average of 7 minutes, 38 seconds in 2005, when 68,907 new cases were recorded, according to Chao Kun-yu, deputy chief of the DOH’s Bureau of Health Promotion.

The report showed that for the first time, colorectal cancer replaced liver cancer as the most common type among new cases recorded in a single year.

Compared with 2005, the number of new colorectal cancer cases rose by 644 to 10,248 in 2006, and liver cancer or intrahepatic bile duct cancer was found among 10,092 people – a jump of 176 cases.

Chao attributed the increased prevalence of colorectal cancer among Taiwanese to increasingly unhealthy dietary habits, such as high consumption of red meat and fat and low fiber intake.

Although people between ages 50 and 69 are advised to have fecal occult blood tests every two years to help early diagnosis of colorectal cancer, DOH statistics indicate that only 11 percent of that age group received the tests in 2008 or 2007, he said.

The third highest number of new cases in 2006 were cancers of the lung, trachea or bronchus, totalling 8,748, followed by breast cancer among women, 6,895 cases; and cancer of the mouth, oropharynx or hypopharynx, 5,352 cases, according to the report.

Rounding out the list of top 10 most common types of cancer in 2006 were stomach cancer, with 3,794 new cases; prostate cancer, with 3,073 new cases; skin cancer, with 2,457 new cases; cervical cancer, with 1,828 new cases; and uterine cancer, with 1,159 new cases.

In terms of age-adjusted incidence rate, an average 50 per 100,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006; 37.44 per 100,000 people were diagnosed with cancer of the liver or intrahepatic bile duct cancer; and 37.35 per 100,000 people were found to have colorectal cancer.

The report revealed that in Taiwan, the risk of cancer among men was 1.4 times higher than among women.

Because of an almost exclusively male habit of chewing betel nuts, the age-adjusted incidence rates of esophageal cancer and oral cancer among men were 15.6 times to 10.4 times higher than among women in 2006, the report stated.

However, women were found to develop cancer at an earlier age than men, with the median age at diagnosis being 59 among women and 65 among men.

Colorectal cancer most common:

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The technique, which leaves healthy cells unaffected, could potentially offer hope to people with hard-to-treat cancers where surgery is not possible.

Although it has only been tested in mice so far, the researchers hope for human trials in two years.

The UK study is published online by the journal Cancer Research.

The genes were wrapped up in microscopic nano-particles which were taken up by cancer cells, but not their healthy neighbours.

Once inside, the genes stimulated production of a protein which destroys the cancer.

The researchers say the technology could potentially be particularly relevant for people with cancers that are inoperable because they are close to vital organs.

They hope it will eventually also be used to treat cancer that has spread.

‘Exciting step’

Lead researcher Dr Andreas Schatzlein, from the School of Pharmacy in London, said: “Gene therapy has a great potential to create safe and effective cancer treatments but getting the genes into cancer cells remains one of the big challenges in this area.

“This is the first time that nanoparticles have been shown to target tumours in such a selective way, and this is an exciting step forward in the field.

“Once inside the cell, the gene enclosed in the particle recognises the cancerous environment and switches on. The result is toxic, but only to the offending cells, leaving healthy tissue unaffected.

“We hope this therapy will be used to treat cancer patients in clinical trials in a couple of years.”

Traditional chemotherapy indiscriminately kills cells in the affected area of the body, which can cause side effects like fatigue, hair loss or nausea.

It is hoped that gene therapy will have fewer associated side effects by targeting cancer cells.

Dr Lesley Walker, of the charity Cancer Research UK, said: “These results are encouraging, and we look forward to seeing if this method can be used to treat cancer in people.

“Gene therapy is an exciting area of research, but targeting genetic changes to cancer cells has been a major challenge.

“This is the first time a solution has been proposed, so it’s exciting news.”

Nano-treatment to torpedo cancer

The so-called Million Women Study of middle-aged women in the United Kingdom found that low to moderate consumption of alcohol increased the risk of and might be responsible for 13 percent of breast, liver, rectal and certain digestive tract cancers.

Researchers determined that only one glass of wine a night might raise the risk of cancer in women.

While prior studies indicated that moderate alcohol consumption could be good for heart health, it now appears that cancer risks from consumption may outweigh the possible cardiovascular benefits.

Oncologists endorsed the findings saying that they had promoted a healthy lifestyle for some time as primary means of reducing cancer risk.

According to the Million Women Study, for every additional drink regularly consumed per day, the increase in incidence up to age 75 years per 1000 for women in developed countries is estimated to be about 15 excess cancers per 1000 women up to age 75.

Million Woman Study Links Alcohol Use to Cancer in Women

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Antisoma and Novartis have a worldwide development and commercialisation agreement for ASA404. Trials in breast cancer will be in addition to two ongoing pivotal phase III trials in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, one (ATTRACT-1) testing ASA404 as a first-line treatment and the other (ATTRACT-2) evaluating ASA404 as a second-line treatment. Because ASA404 acts by disrupting tumour blood vessels, it has potential application against a variety of solid tumours, all of which depend on tumour blood vessels to survive and grow.

Glyn Edwards, Antisoma’s CEO, said: “We are very pleased that Novartis is extending the development of ASA404 to metastatic breast cancer. This represents a significant additional opportunity for ASA404. While there have been many advances in the treatment of breast cancer, there remains a great need for new and innovative approaches, especially for patients with metastatic cancer.”

About metastatic breast cancer

Worldwide, more than a million women are diagnosed with breast cancer and over 400,000 die from the disease each year. Metastatic breast cancer is the most advanced stage (stage IV). Over 100,000 patients present with stage IV disease each year in the US, Europe and Japan.

About ASA404

ASA404 (DMXAA) is a small-molecule Tumour-Vascular Disrupting Agent (Tumour-VDA) which selectively targets the blood vessels that nourish tumours. The drug was discovered by Professors Bruce Baguley and William Denny and their teams at the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre, University of Auckland, New Zealand. It was in-licensed by Antisoma from Cancer Research Ventures Limited (now Cancer Research Technology), the development and commercialisation company of the Cancer Research Campaign (now Cancer Research UK), in August 2001. In a randomised phase II study in non-small cell lung cancer, addition of ASA404 to standard first-line chemotherapy was associated with a 5 month improvement in median survival. Worldwide rights to the drug were licensed to Novartis AG in April 2007.

About Antisoma

Antisoma is a London Stock Exchange-listed biopharmaceutical company that develops novel products for the treatment of cancer. The Company has operations in the UK and the US. Please visit www.antisoma.com for further information about Antisoma.

ASA404 to be developed in breast cancer

While it may sound odd to treat cancer with a drug that acts on bone, evidence is accumulating that such drugs may do more than just prevent the loss of bone. Other studies are testing the drugs in patients with prostate or lung cancer.

The new study, published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, involved 1,803 premenopausal women with tumors that were fueled by estrogen. As part of their treatment, all received drugs that shut down their ovaries, preventing them from making estrogen, along with drugs that stymie cancer cells from using estrogen to grow.

Half also got the bone drug zoledronic acid, or Zometa, as an intravenous infusion twice a year for three years. Those who took the drug had a 36 percent reduction in cancer recurrences and metastases, compared with women who did not get it. After nearly four years, 54 women who received zoledronic acid and 83 who did not had a recurrence of their cancer or had a new cancer in the opposite breast or a metastasis to their bones.

Some cancer researchers said they wanted to see the results from two other large studies of bone drugs and breast cancer before advocating that all women with breast cancer get such drugs. The studies, which include both premenopausal and postmenopausal women, are nearing completion, and their results should be available within the next few years. But the new study has buoyed researchers’ hopes.

“This is really a landmark study,” said Dr. James N. Ingle, head of the breast cancer research program at the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. “It’s a reason for real enthusiasm.”

But for now, he said, “I think it is the general consensus that we are not ready to make this a standard treatment.”

Others are more persuaded.

Dr. Marc E. Lippman, a breast cancer expert who is chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Miami, said many women taking hormonal therapy for breast cancer already take drugs to protect their bones. The hormonal therapy deprives the body of the bone-building effects of estrogen. So, he said, why not give these women zoledronic acid, the bone drug used in the study?

“This is something of a mitzvah,” Dr. Lippman said. “The very therapy you might want to do to counteract the toxicity” of the hormonal therapy “has an additional advantage.”

“I think you have to give it,” he said.

The idea of using a drug like zoledronic acid arose from research into why some cancers, like breast cancers, have a predilection to spread to bone.

One reason, Dr. Ingle said, is that cancer cells interact with a type of bone cell, osteoclasts, whose role is to break down bone. Breast cancer cells that migrate to the bones stimulate osteoclasts. Osteoclasts then produce substances that stimulate the cancer cells.

“You get this vicious cycle,” he said.

Drugs used to treat osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease that often occurs in the elderly, home in on osteoclasts and stop them from releasing substances that cause bone loss. As the osteoclasts stop working, they die.

So the idea arose: Perhaps osteoporosis drugs might prevent cancer cells from growing in bones.

Other studies of the osteoporosis drugs, known as bisphosphonates, indicated that they might also have other anticancer effects. In the laboratory, at least, they stopped cancer cells from growing new blood supplies. And bisphosphonates made cancer cells self-destruct in laboratory studies.

In addition, said Dr. Eric P. Winer, a breast cancer specialist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, still other studies indicated that bisphosphonates affected how well cancer cells stuck to surrounding tissue and whether they were able to invade other tissue and proliferate.

And, said Dr. Michael Gnant of the Medical University of Vienna, the lead author of the new study, recent research indicates that particularly in the early stages of many cancers, there is a population of tumor cells that migrate to the bones and hide in bone marrow. Bisphosphonates, he said, might squelch those cells, affecting the ability of the disease to recur.

“This is a general mechanism for all cancers,” Dr. Gnant said. “Not just cancers that metastasize to bone.”

The idea for the cancer studies began when researchers, like Dr. Trevor J. Powles, a professor of breast oncology at Parkside Oncology in London, started asking whether bisphosphonates could treat cancer that had already spread to bone. They could, it turned out, and zoledronic acid and other bisphosphonates were subsequently approved for that use and shown to prevent further spread of cancer in bones. In fact, Zometa is approved only for bone complications of cancer, like fractures — it is not licensed as an osteoporosis drug.

Those discoveries led Dr. Powles and his colleagues and, independently, two other groups of researchers, to ask whether the drugs, in the high doses used to treat cancer, might prevent breast cancer from spreading in the first place.

The results, published a few years ago, were mixed. Dr. Powles’s study found that when women took a bisphosphonate their cancer was less likely to spread to their bones and they lived longer. Another study also found that the cancer was less likely to spread. But the third study found no effect.

Dr. Gnant, in the meantime, had begun a much larger study with intravenous zoledronic acid at a much lower dose, given twice a year for three years. The concern with the drug is a rare and very serious side effect, osteonecrosis of the jaw. But in this study at least, it did not occur.

And the surprising result of his study, if it holds up, indicates that zoledronic acid could add a benefit to existing breast cancer therapy that is nearly the same magnitude as the benefit conferred by chemotherapy or hormonal therapy alone.

But Dr. Gnant urges caution.

“While everyone is very excited, we still need to be conservative about what we recommend to patients,” he said. “In clinical science we do clinical trials. I am still hesitating to say, ‘Well, this is good for everyone.’ In the history of science we sometimes extrapolated and turned out to be absolutely wrong.”

“The right way to proceed,” Dr. Gnant said, “is to wait for data to come in from other studies.”

Bone Drugs May Help Fight Breast Cancer – NYTimes.com

In typical breast cancers, the tumor forms a lump that a person can feel or see on a mammogram. In the inflammatory kind, which makes up 1 to 2 percent of the roughly 180,000 new breast cancer cases per year, the cancer “is often not a mass,” says Dr. Eric Winer, chief of the Division of Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “Instead, the breast is often warm, red, swollen and tender.” The cancer is often misdiagnosed as an infection treatable by antibiotics.

The cancer moves so quickly “that the breast can become noticeably larger in just a few weeks,” says Dr. Barbara Smith, director of the breast program at Massachusetts General Hospital. What makes the cancer so dangerous, she says, is that it grows in the lymphatic vessels, “the highways out of the breast to the rest of the body.” Immediate treatment is essential.

Women with inflammatory cancer get chemotherapy first to get rid of cancer cells that have spread to the rest of the body, then surgery and radiation.

A potent drug called Herceptin can also be used.

Two years ago, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas became the first clinic in the world to open a specialized program for inflammatory breast cancer. Other centers, including Dana-Farber, are developing such programs.

Because care is specialized, doctors advise women to seek treatment at major medical centers.

What is inflammatory breast cancer and is it worse than regular breast cancer?

Yes — but only the 20% to 30% of breast cancers that express the HER2 molecules, suggest studies by Javier A. Menendez, PhD, at the Catalan Institute of Oncology in Girona, Spain, and colleagues.

The Spanish researchers wondered why some studies show that the olive-oil-rich Mediterranean diet cuts breast cancer risk while other studies do not. They theorized that the active compounds in olive oil only affect certain cancers.

The breast cancer drug Herceptin targets the HER2 molecule on tumor cells. Could olive oil compounds have the same target?

Menendez’s team first isolated various compounds from EVOO — which, because it is made without heat, keeps most of the olive compounds that are lost in more processed, lower quality olive oils.

They found that two types of these compounds, secoiridoids and lignans, killed off HER2-positive human breast cancer cells but had little effect on HER2-negative cells.

They also found that when they fed large amounts of EVOO to rats with carcinogen-induced breast cancers, the animals’ tumors became less malignant.

But this does not mean that eating a lot of EVOO will prevent or treat breast cancer.

“Extreme caution must be applied” in interpreting their findings, Menendez and colleagues warn.

One class of EVOO anticancer compounds, the secoiridoids, “rapidly split into inactive compounds” when eaten. These compounds likely won’t help if eaten, but could be a starting point for development of new breast cancer drugs.

On the other hand, the lignan compounds “may represent a different molecular scenario,” Menendez and colleagues suggest. In mouse-feeding studies, tumor tissues accumulate lignans, “thus suggesting that the anti-cancer activity of lignans may be due to their direct local effects on the breast cancer tissues.”

A recent study suggested that eating flaxseed is beneficial to women with newly diagnosed breast cancer. Flaxseed has high lignan concentrations.

Even so, Menendez and colleagues note that much more study will be needed before doctors can recommend EVOO for breast cancer prevention or treatment.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil vs. Breast Cancer

“Most young women at risk of breast cancer following chest radiation for a pediatric cancer, including women at highest risk (Hodgkin lymphoma survivors), are not being appropriately screened,” Kevin C. Oeffinger, MD, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and colleagues write.

About 20,000 to 25,000 women 25 and older in the U.S. have received chest radiation for a childhood cancer, according to background information in the journal report. For the past decade, experts have recommended yearly screening mammograms for women who received moderate- to high-dose chest radiation beginning either at age 25 or eight years after the treatment, whichever occurs last.

In 2008, the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) updated the guidelines to include breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) along with yearly mammograms. The American Cancer Society recommends the same.

But some women in the new study had never even had a mammogram.

About 12% to 20% of women who receive moderate- to high-dose chest radiation for a childhood cancer will be diagnosed with breast cancer by age 45, but some develop the disease much earlier. “The risk of breast cancer begins to increase as early as 8 years after radiation and the [midpoint] age of breast cancer diagnosis ranges from 32 to 35 years,” Oeffinger’s team writes.

Oeffinger and colleagues based their findings on a 114-item questionnaire filled out by 625 female participants, aged 25 to 50, of the Childhood Cancer Survivors Study (CCSS). All the women had survived childhood cancer and had been treated with chest radiation.

The researchers compared the women’s responses to similarly aged childhood cancer survivors who did not receive chest radiation, and siblings with no history of childhood cancer.

Among women 25 to 39 who had received chest radiation for childhood cancer:

* Most (47.3%) never had a mammogram.
* 63.5% had not received a screening mammogram within the past two years, despite guidelines that recommend annual exams.
* Less than a fourth (23.3%) had a screening or diagnostic mammogram in the previous year.
* They were three times more likely to have had a mammogram if their doctor recommended one.

Among women 40 to 50 who had received chest radiation for childhood cancer:

* They were more likely to have had mammograms than those aged 25 to 39.
* About two-thirds (76.5%) had a screening mammogram in the past two years (compared with 70% for women who did not receive chest radiation during childhood and 67% for siblings without history of childhood cancer).
* Slightly more than half (52%) had regular breast cancer screenings. (This finding was not significantly higher than those who never had chest radiation.)

Many Childhood Cancer Survivors Skip Breast Cancer Screenings

Breast tumors in men are usually palpable by the time they’re discovered or they show signs “such as change in overlying skin or nipple,” Dr. Wei-Tse Yang told Reuters Health.

“Be attentive to any palpable masses in men and obtain imaging evaluation early,” he advises doctors.

In their report, Yang from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and colleagues describe the appearance of male breast tumors as seen on a mammogram or by ultrasound.

Among 244 men with breast cancer, only 57 underwent preoperative mammography or sonography, and that was because of clear signs of a problem: 54 had a palpable mass and two had nipple inversion or nipple discharge.

In a third of the cases, mammography showed a calcified mass, which is often considered to be benign.

“Radiologists should be aware of these findings to avoid the misdiagnosis of cancer in men as a benign lesion,” the investigators say.

Breast cancer in men often detected late | Health | Reuters