Kim Stewart would liked to have spent Saturday morning behind the handlebars of his motorcycle. Instead, he pulled his orange and black cruiser into the parking lot at Park Ridge City Hall to have his blood drawn and his rectum examined as part of a free prostate cancer screening sponsored by the Chicago Sun-Times.

“I’m at the age where I know I need to take steps to [look] for things that regular doctors won’t catch,” said Stewart, 54, of Morton Grove. “The exam was messy, but it was worth it.”

Stewart was one of 3,775 Chicago area men who dropped trou last week for free prostate screenings from mobile clinics parked around the region.

The turnout was the largest in the four-year history of the Drive Against Prostate Cancer, according to officials at the National Prostate Cancer Coalition, a co-sponsor of the initiative.

Full story CANCER EXAMS | Sun-Times campaign sets turnout record
April 29, 2007 BY BEN GOLDBERGER Staff Reporter

Today’s New York Times reports that two groups of scientists have independently made major discoveries about the immune system. One group is led by Allan Bradley and Martin Turner in England and the other by Klaus Rajewsky at Harvard Medical School.

“These findings demonstrate the importance of this level of control in the immune system and will lead immunologists to rethink how the immune system works,” said Dr Martin Turner, Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development at the Babraham Institute.

According to today’s issue of the journal Science, Friday Apriil 27, the discoveries number not just 2 but 4:

In a flurry of papers, three of which appear on pages 575, 604, and 608 of this issue of Science, four independent groups have for the first time deleted mouse genes for microRNAs, RNA molecules that can modulate gene behavior, with profound effects.

Unique in Canada, offers right information at right time to men diagnosed with disease
ANDREA MACRAE
The Guardian

The day Norm Fotheringham got his diagnosis he knew only one thing about prostate cancer: that it was deadly.

“My brother was dying of prostate cancer. I had my operation in April and he died in June of that same year. I wouldn’t have had my prostate checked without him. So he basically saved my life.”

That was in 1998 in Ontario. Now Fotheringham helps prostate cancer patients on P.E.I. as chairman of the Prostate Cancer Support Group.

It’s his way of giving something back, he says.
Full story, The Guardian Charlottetown, PEI, Canada

When Provenge vaccine for prostate cancer is approved by the FDA, as most likely it will be on or by May 15, this decision to make this new therapy available immediately to any patient who can afford or whose insurance covers it — rather than to delay approval until the results are in from a larger clinical trial — will be due to Michael Milken. In Cora Daniels’ blockbuster article for Fortune Magazine (November 2004), The Man Who Changed Medicine, reprinted at Cptech.com, Milken said:

I believe the person who waits for 110% of the facts to be in and all the information is a person who is probably not alive — because it’s too late for him. A lot of businesspeople have been forced to make decisions without 100% or perfect information but based on what they know. I worked in a field where ten seconds was a long decision process. Either you’re buying the securities or you’re not. Either you’re selling them or you’re not. Now people said, ‘Well, gosh, that’s a short period of time,’ and I say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I’ve prepared my entire life to make that decision. I think getting off that inertia of making a decision qualifies well in building something.

Dr. Maha Hussain (left) is calling for an open access program for Dendreon’s Provenge prostate cancer vaccine (Sipuleucel-T) pending completion of an ongoing, 500 man clinical trial, She made this suggestion March 29 during the FDA Advisory Committee hearing after voting “No” on the vaccine’s efficacy. She followed up with a letter to the FDA reiterating her “No” position and again calling for an open access program.

Dr. Hussain is the second oncologist among 4 members of the panel who voted “No” to the efficacy of the drug who has followed up with a letter to the FDA.

Dr. Maha Hussain, an oncologist who was one of 4 out of 17 members of the FDA Advisory Committee to vote against accepting against the company’s claim to efficacy for Provenge (Sipuleucel-T) prostate cancer vaccine, is calling for an expanded access program to empower patients who want and need it to receive the drug while an ongoing 500 man clinical trial of Provenge is completed.

A new blood test for detecting prostate cancer, ProstaMark ® EPCA-2, is expected to enter large trials soon and may be available to the public in under 2 years. A study in the April issue of Urology presents evidence in support of EPCA-2 testing as a more accurate way to identify early stage and advanced cancer in the prostate. Full story

Ambrilia, a Montreal company, said today that results of a Phase I/II trial of PCK3145 in patients with metastatic prostate cancer show that the drug, a small molecule peptide, slows tumor doubling time..

Previously, detailed Phase I results were presented at ASCO and are online: Slovin, S., et al. Phase I trial results of PCK3145 in patients with castrate metastatic prostate cancer: the US experience. ASCO Prostate Cancer – San Francisco, California, U.S.A., February 2006.

Scientists have discovered that some Chinese people carry a gene variant that protects them against cancer. A variant of the same gene, caspase-8 (CASP8), was discovered earlier this year to afford some Western women protection from breast cancer. In US men, caspase-8 is involved in cell-signaling regulation by the androgen receptor and may play a role in prostate cancer.

A daily dose of adult-strength aspirin may modestly reduce cancer risk in populations with high rates of colorectal, prostate, and breast cancer if taken for at least five years.