The Prostate Net will host a daylong, dual-track educational symposium targeting patients, caregivers and medical professionals on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at New York University, Kimmel Center for University Life in New York City. (http://theprostatenet.org/Symposium.html)

Us TOO University Presents:
Estrogen Deficiency Side Effects Due to Androgen Deprivation Therapy.

This free webinar/teleconference with speaker Samir Taneja MD will
take place Wednesday, September 23, 2009, at 8pm Eastern,
7pm Central, 6pm Mountain, 5pm Pacific.

For more information and to RSVP today, go to:
http://www.ustooevents.org/site/Survey?ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&SURVEY_ID=2700

Dr. Robert Getzenberg, research director at Johns Hopkins Brady Urological Institute, said this morning that the EPCA-2 prostate cancer blood test is moving ahead and the law suit filed against him and the University of Pittsburgh is “for money.”

We spoke with Dr. Getzenberg by phone at 9.50 this morning after leaving a message yesterday with his staff. He returned the call from his Johns Hopkins office, sounding up-beat.

“The science remains the same,” Getzenberg said about the progress of the EPCA-2 prostate cancer diagnostic test. “Everything is solid.”

Dr. Robert H. Getzenberg, a leading University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins cancer researcher who claims to have developed superior new blood tests to detect prostate cancer, colon cancer, and bladder cancer has been accused of making false claims over a period of years and selling these false claims to keep his laboratory working.

Onconome, Inc. a biotechnology company, earlier this month filed an action in Federal court charging that from 2001 to 2005 the University of Pittsburgh and one of its researchers, Dr. Robert H. Getzenberg, committed scientific research fraud and breach of contract.

Dr. Getzenberg has also worked at Johns Hopkins, a leading US center for treatment of prostate cancer and other urological diseases.

Dr. Getzenberg’s best-known scientific project is the EPCA-2 biomarker, a discovery claimed to detect prostate cancer better than the currently used PSA blood test.

Libya’s most prominent prostate cancer patient, Abdelbasset al Megrahi, convicted as the “Lockerbie bomber,” and released on compassionate grounds of his illness, either is or is not in an intensive care unit.

Megrahi served eight years of a life sentence for the murder of 270 people on Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. Some relatives of British victims and some political commentators believe that Megrahi was a fall guy for Syrian involvement. At the same time outrage is swirling over a perceived exchange of Megrahi for renewal of UK interest in Libyan oil.

Is Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the convicted and now released Lockerbie bomber, really on the brink of dying of prostate cancer? Official letters about his release from prison in Scotland omit his medical records. These records remain sealed.

According to a Libyan official Mr Megrahi, age 57, “is a dying man.” Libyan Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Mohammed Sialam, told reporters that al-Megrahi is in worsening condition and is not expected to survive much longer.

At home in Tripoli, over the weekend he was rushed to hospital. A British TV team was invited in to film him in his private room. Fluorescent light turns greenish on TV and he looks quite ill. Channel 4 (UK)’s Jonathan Miller says “It looked to me as though Abdel Basset al-Megrahi wasn’t long for this world.” But a vital signs monitor, which looks only half half hooked-up, shows his heart rate within normal range.

Updated Sept 1 2009 at Lockerbie Bomber Megrahi Hospitalized for Prostate Cancer

ZD4054 is a potential anti-cancer agent now in a clinical trials around the world for men with metastatic hormone refractory prostate cancer (HRPC) and for men with non-metastatic hormone refractory prostate cancer.

The trials are run by pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which makes ZD4054. These two distinct trials differ significantly in the level of therapy offered to men who do not receive the novel (new and not yet proven) trial drug.

The novel drug is a selective endothelin-A receptor antagonist (SERA) from the same family as atrasentan (brand name Xinlay) and YM598. Xinlay, which for a while looked quite promising, failed to prove effective in clinical trials for prostate cancer in 2005 and did not win FDA approval.

A study published in Clinical Cancer Research August 18 2009 reports that an extract of the Chinese herb Wedelia (a member of the Asteraceae, or sunflower family of plants) shrinks the androgen receptor and prostate cancer in male mice.

“Wedelia chinensis,” the authors write, “is a common ingredient of anti-inflammatory herbal medicines in Taiwan and southern China. Inflammation is involved in promoting tumor growth, invasion, and metastasis. This study aims to test the biological effects in vivo of W. chinensis extract on prostate cancer.”

Patients who experience fatigue during radiotherapy for breast or prostate cancer may be reacting to activation of the proinflammatory cytokine network, a known inflammatory pathway, according to a report in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

• Fatigue is a major side effect of radiotherapy
• Inflammation mechanism suggests possible treatment option
• Test done in breast and prostate cancer