Resistant Cancers Self-Destruct When Exposed to Experimental Drug
May 3, 2018. PSA Rising / UCSF / San Francisco researchers have discovered a promising new line of attack against lethal, treatment-resistant prostate cancer. Analysis of hundreds of human prostate tumors revealed that the most aggressive cancers depend on a built-in cellular stress response to put a brake on their own hot-wired physiology. Experiments in mice and with human cells showed that blocking this stress response with an experimental drug — previously shown to enhance cognition and restore memory after brain damage in rodents — causes treatment-resistant cancer cells to self-destruct while leaving normal cells unaffected.
Metastatic human prostate cancer cells transplanted into a mouse self-destruct (red) when treated with ISRIB, an experimental drug that exposes cancer cells to their full, unhealthy appetite for protein synthesis. Credit: Ruggero Lab / UCSF
May 1, 2018. PSA Rising / UT Southwestern Medical Center. Not long ago, I examined an otherwise healthy and active retiree in his 50s with newly diagnosed metastatic lung cancer. He had no heart disease, no kidney disease, no liver disease. He came to my practice at UT Southwestern Medical Center specifically for clinical trial options.
David Gerber, M.D., is associate director for clinical research at the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Disappointingly, one detail in his medical history excluded him from all of our available trials. Four years earlier, he had been treated for stage 1 prostate cancer, a disease so prevalent and nonaggressive that the U.S. government no longer recommends routine screening for it. I couldn’t think of a single way in which the patient’s prior experience with cancer would interfere with treatments or assessments on a lung cancer trial. And yet I couldn’t enroll him.
This month’s issue of Prostatepedia, a patient-centered prostate cancer publication created and edited by Dr. Charles “Snuffy” Meyers, focuses on clinical trials.
One of the articles featured, “Clinical Trials for Prostate Cancer Patients,” is written by Tony Crispino, Us TOO Las Vegas Support Group Leader and Rick Bangs, bladder and prostate cancer survivor. Both Tony and Rick serve as research advocates at SWOG and the National Cancer Institute. In their article, they outline the prostate cancer clinical trial process with additional commentary by prostate cancer warrior and clinical trial participant Bob Klingle and his wife Jean.
April 18 2018. PSA Rising /Roswell Park, Buffalo, N.Y/. Researchers at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center have found that cancer patients who were physically active both before and after treatment were 40% more likely to survive than those who were physically inactive. This was true for many different disease types, including prostate, breast, colon, ovarian, bladder, endometrial, esophageal and skin cancer.
The associations between habitual inactivity and cancer mortality remained consistently strong regardless of the patient’s sex, tumor stage, smoking status or body-mass index (BMI).
The 40% higher probable survival rate in physically active patients is “remarkable,” the Roswell teams says. Another striking observation was that previously inactive patients who began exercising after their diagnosis increased their odds of survival by nearly 30%.
Dr. Rikki Cannioto PhD, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center
Patients participating in as few as one to two sessions of regular, weekly exercise experienced similar survival advantages as those who exercised more frequently, the researchers found. “In other words, when it comes to exercise, something is better than nothing but regular, weekly exercise seems to really make a difference,” says says lead author Rikki Cannioto, PhD, EdD, MS.
“In fact, patients who were physically active three or four days a week experienced an even greater benefit than those who exercised daily, and patients who had only one or two days of regular activity per week did nearly as well. This is particularly encouraging, as cancer patients and survivors can be overwhelmed by current physical activity recommendations.” Continue reading “Sedentary Lifestyle Drastically Increases Risk of Dying from Cancer”
Monday, 9 April 2018. By taking a high-cost drug with a low-fat meal—instead of on an empty stomach, as prescribed—prostate cancer patients could decrease their daily dose, prevent digestive issues and cut costs by 75 percent, according to a new study in the March 28, 2018, issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO).
Abiraterone acetate, marketed as Zytiga®, is a standard medicine prescribed for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. The pharmaceutical company tells patients on Zytiga to take four of the 250 milligram pills first thing in the morning. Then, having gone without food overnight, they must wait at least one more hour before eating breakfast.
“This schedule is not only inconvenient for patients, it’s also wasteful, in several ways,” said the study’s lead author, Russell Szmulewitz, MD, associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and a prostate cancer specialist.
