In a recent letter to Cancer Investigation, David Steinberg, a hematologist at Lahey Clinic, Burlington, Mass, wrote:

“A $1,000 lottery ticket for a Porsche Boxster automobile was offered to the investigator who accrued the most patients to a Southwest Oncology Group prostate cancer protocol.”

“This was done” Dr. Steinberg says,” with the admirable intention of increasing patient accrual and improving the outlook for men with high risk prostate cancer.”

From the point of view of the patients pulled in as “bodies” for this trial, a skeptic might say, the intention was not necessarily admirable. How is a doctor going to give a patient a fair and unbiased evaluation of whether a trial is good for that indivual to enter when a Porsche beckons - And the patient doesn’t know about this? At the very least, the doctors should have been obliged to disclose their chance of winning the Porsche among other information required for the patient’s informed consent.

The Boxster is the fastest selling Porsche in history with a base price of $42,000, nicely loaded for $9,000 more.

Kudos to Dr. Steinberg for protesting this sleaze.
(full story…)

Vitamin E succinate suppresses prostate tumor growth by inducing apoptosis.
Department of Interdisciplinary Oncology, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, FL. Int J Cancer. 2005 Dec 27; [Epub ahead of print]

Vitamin E (VE) has been under intensive study as a chemopreventive agent for various types of cancers. Preclinical studies suggest that vitamin E succinate (VES) is the most effective antitumor analogue of VE, yet there are scarce studies of VES in prostate cancer. In this study, we investigated the effects of VES on a panel of prostate cancer cells, and a xenograft model of prostate cancer. Our results indicate that VES significantly inhibited proliferation and induced apoptosis of prostate cancer cell lines in a dose and time dependent manner. The results of microarray analysis followed by real-time RT-PCR and inhibitor analyses indicated that the VES-induced apoptosis is mediated by caspase-4 in prostate tumor cells. In our animal model of prostate cancer in SCID mouse, daily injection of VES significantly suppressed tumor growth as well as lung metastases. These results suggest a potential therapeutic utility of VES for patients with prostate cancer.