Citizens in Berkley, MA, population 6,200 citizens in southeastern Massachusetts (source: Berkely fire chief) , say a local dump site is causing cancer.

In a story subtitled “What if where one chose to live dictated whether or not they died of cancer?,” the Taunton Gazette reports:

A group of neighbors on Burt Street claims this may be the case, because they say a toxic waste cleanup site may not have been properly purified.

The site is part of a North Main Street property, known as Cranberry Crossing, that was used from the mid-1930s to the 1960s as a tannery waste dumping ground.”

A developer plans to build on this land and residents are upset.
(full story…)

When local treatments for prostate cancer have failed, and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) rises in the absence of symptoms, there is little consensus as to the best management strategy.

Calcitriol has been shown to prolong the doubling time of PSA in this context, but near-toxic doses are required.

We investigated the effect of the nutrient vitamin D (cholecalciferol), a biochemical precursor of calcitriol, on PSA levels and the rate of rise of PSA in these patients.

Fifteen patients were given 2,000 IU (50 microg) of cholecalciferol daily and monitored prospectively every 2-3 months.

In 9 patients, PSA levels decreased or remained unchanged after the commencement of cholecalciferol. This was sustained for as long as 21 months.
(full story…)

Among the other major advances recognized by American Society of Clinical Oncology (American Society of Clinical Oncology) in 2005:

• The drug Herceptin was found to reduce the recurrence of HER-2-positive early-stage breast cancer by half when added to standard chemotherapy; the risk of death was cut by one-third compared with standard chemotherapy alone.
• Chemotherapy after surgery was found to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer recurrence. The drug oxaliplatin cut recurrence risk by up to 24 per cent.
• A large trial showed the drug Avastin - which starves tumours of the blood supply they need to grow - in combination with chemotherapy can significantly extend survival in patients with advanced lung cancer
• Avastin was also found to significantly improve survival for advanced colorectal cancer when used in conjunction with standard chemotherapy.
• Two different vaccines were effective at preventing 90 to 100 per cent of infections with human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus linked to cervical cancer.
• Canadian researchers found that people with an early form of the most common type of lung cancer lived longer if they were treated with chemotherapy after surgery to remove their tumor.

“This report demonstrates the important progress being made in all areas of clinical cancer research,” society president Dr. Sandra Horning said in a release Friday. “The message is one of hope - the advances identified by this report underscore the essential role of cancer research in finding solutions for a disease” that strikes millions of people each year.

Based on reports by SHERYL UBELACKER in Macleans and Cnews

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…)

African American men have the highest prostate cancer incidence and mortality rates in the world.

African-American women who develop breast cancer are more likely to die from the disease than white women of the same age.

Survival rates are worse among African-Americans for colon and ovarian cancers as well.

And now a new study from Dana-Farber has found that even when they have equal access to specialized care, blacks with potentially curable lung cancer are about half as likely as whites to undergo surgery that could save their lives.

These findings point to a subtle and complex “communications problem” underlying the inequality, said Christopher Lathan, MD, of Dana-Farber and lead author of the report that is published online by the Journal of Clinical Oncology and will be in the journal’s Jan. 20 print issue.

“Something’s not happening. There was no specific reason that could be found, but there needs to be more attention paid to the doctor-patient interaction.” Full story:

Blacks’ lower rate of lung cancer surgery not just due to access to care

Study suggests racial disparities stem from doctor-patient interaction

December 27, 2005 -Taking 1,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D3 daily appears to lower an individual’s risk of developing certain cancers – including colon, breast, and ovarian cancer – by up to 50 percent, according to cancer prevention specialists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Medical Center. The researchers call for prompt public health action to increase intake of vitamin D3 as an inexpensive tool for prevention of diseases that claim millions of lives each year. Full story

$50m pledge will help Therion develop drug

By Stephen Heuser, Globe Staff | December 26, 2005

In an unusual effort by a single wealthy investor to keep a medical idea alive, a German billionaire is promising $50 million to Therion Biologics Corp., a small Cambridge company trying to develop the first-ever therapeutic vaccine for cancer. ….

ts lead product, Panvac-VF, is a series of injections designed to fight pancreatic cancer, which strikes 30,000 Americans each year and is almost always fatal.

Early tests of Panvac showed it extended the lives of patients with late-stage pancreatic cancer, and the company expects results from a larger trial on 250 patients early next year. If it shows significant benefits, the company will apply for FDA approval.

‘’We’re all figuratively holding our breath waiting for the results of this trial,” said Leuchtenberger.

Like shots for flu or measles, cancer vaccines are designed to train the body’s immune system to fight a specific disease.

Unlike a traditional vaccine, however, the drug being tested by Therion is not preventive. Rather, it is given to people who already have cancer, in the hopes that their immune cells can learn to recognize and attack the cancer as it tries to grow and spread in the body.

A success in the trial would let Therion enter the lucrative niche of last-chance cancer therapies, among the most expensive drugs in modern medicine.

Full story at the Boston Globe’s boston.com business section

By GINA KOLATA Full story, NYTimes Health (requires free registration), December 27, 2005

Also online at Detnews.com. Excerpt:

In other genetic diseases, gene alterations disable cells. In cancer, genetic changes give cells a sort of superpower.

At first, as scientists grew to appreciate the complexity of cancer genetics, they despaired. “If there are 100 genetic abnormalities, that’s 100 things you need to fix to cure cancer,” said Dr. Todd Golub, the director of the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., and an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “That’s a horrifying thought.”

Making matters more complicated, scientists discovered that the genetic changes in one patient’s tumor were different from those in another patient with the same type of cancer. That led to new questioning. Was every patient going to be a unique case? Would researchers need to discover new drugs for every single patient?

“People said, ‘It’s hopelessly intractable and too complicated a problem to ever figure out,’ ” Dr. Golub recalled.

But to their own amazement, scientists are now finding that untangling the genetics of cancer is not impossible. In fact, they say, what looked like an impenetrable shield protecting cancer cells turns out to be flimsy. And those seemingly impervious cancer cells, Dr. Golub said, “are very much poised to die.”

In the end, all those altered genes may end up being the downfall of cancer cells, researchers say.

“Cancer cells have many Achilles’ heels,” Dr. Golub says. “It may take a couple of dozen mutations to cause a cancer, all of which are required for the maintenance and survival of the cancer cell.”

Gleevec, researchers say, was the first test of this idea. The drug knocks out a gene product, abl kinase, that is overly abundant in chronic myelogenous leukemia. The first clinical trial, which began seven years ago, seemed like a long shot.

Pizza has been accepted as one food which perhaps helps protect men against the risk of prostate cancer in North America.

But according to cancer researchers in Italy, pizza’s home territory, not much information exists about pizza-eating and risk of other sex-hormone related cancers (breast and ovarian).

Nor is much known, these researchers say in an article to be published in February 2006 European Journal of Cancer Prevention, about how pizza eating affects risk of cancer in people beyond the USA.

Using data from 4864 patients and the same number of people without cancer in three hospital-based case-control studies conducted in Italy between 1991 and 2002, they found no strong link.

People who ate one or more slices of pizza a week were counted as “regular eaters.”

“Our results do not show a relevant role of pizza on the risk of sex hormone-related cancers.,” the authors write in their summary. “The difference with selected studies from North America suggests that dietary and lifestyle correlates of pizza eating vary between different populations and social groups.”

An earlier study from this group (European Journal of Cancer Prevention. October 2004.) found that “Regular consumption of pizza, one of the most typical Italian foods, showed a reduced risk of digestive tract cancers. Pizza could however simply be an indicator of a typical Italian diet.”

Blinded by the light: Irofulven chemotherapy trials

By JACQUELINE STRAX December 16, 2005 /PSA Rising/ The chemotherapy drug Irofulven, a drug based on a poison in the jack o’lantern fungi, is in clinical trials in the USA, Canada and Europe for prostate, ovarian, hepatic and other cancers. A surprising side effect is retinal damage.

Higher Vitamin D Daily Dose Could Halve Colon Cancer Risk, UCSD researchers say

December 20, 2005 - Taking 1,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D 3 daily appears to lower an individual’s risk of developing colorectal cancer by 50 percent, according to cancer prevention specialists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Medical Center. Full story

New Study Suggests Artificial Sweetener Causes Cancer in Rats at Levels Currently Approved for Humans

Report in Environmental Health Perspectives calls for reevaluation of acceptable limits of aspartame consumption

November 17, 2005 [Research Triangle Park, NC] ] A statistically significant increase in the incidence of malignant tumors, lymphomas and leukemias in rats exposed to varying doses of aspartame appears to link the artificial sweetener to a high carcinogenicity rate, according to a study accepted for publication today by the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP).

The authors of the study, the first to demonstrate multipotential carcinogenic effects of aspartame administered to rats in feed, called for an “urgent reevaluation” of the current guidelines for the use and consumption of this compound.

“Our study has shown that aspartame is a multipotential carcinogenic compound whose carcinogenic effects are also evident at a daily dose of 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight (mg/kg), notably less than the current acceptable daily intake for humans,” the authors write. Currently, the acceptable daily intake for humans is set at 50 mg/kg in the United States and 40 mg/kg in Europe.

Aspartame is the second most widely used artificial sweetener in the world. It is found in more than 6,000 products including carbonated and powdered soft drinks, hot chocolate, chewing gum, candy, desserts, yogurt, and tabletop sweeteners, as well as some pharmaceutical products like vitamins and sugar-free cough drops. More than 200 million people worldwide consume it. The sweetener has been used for more than 30 years, having first been approved by the FDA in 1974. Studies of the carcinogenicity of aspartame performed by its producers have been negative.

Researchers administered aspartame to Sprague-Dawley rats by adding it to a standard diet. They began studying the rats at 8 weeks of age and continued until the spontaneous death of each rat. Treatment groups received feed that contained concentrations of aspartame at dosages simulating human daily intakes of 5,000, 2,500, 500, 100, 20, and 4 mg/kg body weight. Groups consisted of 100 males and 100 females at each of the three highest dosages and 150 males and 150 females at all lower dosages and controls.

The experiment ended after the death of the last animal at 159 weeks. At spontaneous death, each animal underwent examination for microscopic changes in all organs and tissues, a process different from the aspartame studies conducted 30 years ago and one that was designed to allow aspartame to fully express any carcinogenic potential.

The treated animals showed extensive evidence of malignant cancers including lymphomas, leukemias, and tumors at multiple organ sites in both males and females. The authors speculate the increase in lymphomas and leukemias may be related to one of the metabolites in aspartame, namely methanol, which is metabolized in both rats and humans to formaldehyde. Both methanol and formaldehyde have shown links to lymphomas and leukemias in other long-term experiments by the same authors.

The current study included more animals over a longer period than earlier studies. “In our opinion, previous studies did not comply with today’s basic requirements for testing the carcinogenic potential of a physical or chemical agent, in particular concerning the number of rodents for each experimental group (40-86, compared to 100-150 in the current study) and the termination of previous studies at only 110 weeks of age of the animals,” the study authors wrote.

The authors of the study were Morando Soffritti, Fiorella Belpoggi, Davide Degli Esposti, Luca Lambertini, Eva Tibaldi, and Anna Rigano of the Cesare Maltoni Cancer Research Center, Oncology Ramazzini Foundation of Environmental and Environmental Sciences, Bologna, Italy. Funding for the research was provided by the Oncology Ramazzini Foundation of Environmental and Environmental Sciences, Bologna, Italy. The article is available free of charge at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2005/8711/abstract.html.

EHP is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. EHP EHP is an Open Access journal. More information is available online at http://www.ehponline.org/. Brogan & Partners Convergence Marketing handles marketing and public relations for EHP, and is responsible for creation and distribution of this press release.