Harvard Medical School

Anti-cancer vaccines are emerging

Source: Boston Globe Author: Karen Weintraub Long envisioned drugs to harness the immune system could reshape treatments For more than a century, doctors and patients have dreamed of using the body’s own defenses to fight cancer. Why, they wondered, can’t the immune system - so good at tracking down and destroying intruders - attack the tumor cells that invade healthy tissue? Finally, science is catching up with this vision. Just reaching the market in a big way, so-called therapeutic vaccines turn a patient’s immune system against the cancer and help prevent a recurrence. If the early promise of these vaccines is realized, they will soon join the basic arsenal for fighting all cancers, several researchers said. “We really are in a transformative moment,’’ said Dr. Glenn Dranoff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a medical oncologist and immunologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Prostate cancer patients were the first to benefit. A therapeutic vaccine called Provenge received federal approval last year after studies showed it safely extended the lives of advanced prostate cancer patients for an average of 4.1 months. Then came a vaccine called Yervoy, designed to attack melanoma, a particularly dangerous form of skin cancer. Cancer generally turns down the body’s immune response to a tumor; Yervoy is designed to turn it back on, enhancing the immune system’s ability to kill cancer cells. Many more cancer vaccines are under development, with hundreds of trials underway in patients with breast, prostate, lung, kidney, colon, cervical, brain, and [...]

Charlotte Parker2011-12-19T14:52:52-07:00December, 2011|Oral Cancer News|

When the state paid, people stopped smoking: study

Source: Reuters By: Maggie Fox When Massachusetts started paying for stop-smoking treatments, people not only kicked the habit but also had fewer heart attacks, researchers reported on Tuesday in the first study to show a clear payoff from investing in smoking prevention efforts. Smoking dropped by 10 percent among clients of Medicaid, the state health insurance plan for the poor, and nearly 40 percent of Medicaid patients who smoked used benefits to get nicotine patches or drugs to help them quit, the researchers said. The study -- which suggests states can save money from investing in efforts to cut smoking -- found the yearly rate of hospital admissions for heart attacks fell by 46 percent for Medicaid clients and 49 percent fewer of them were hospitalized for clogged arteries. "The dramatic decline in heart attack hospitalizations for smokers who used the benefit is stunning and demonstrates the effectiveness of tobacco treatment coverage that includes behavioral counseling and medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration," American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown, who was not involved in the research, said in a statement. Thomas Land and colleagues at the Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program, as well as the Harvard Medical School, looked at hospital records for the study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine. In July 2006, the Massachusetts Medicaid program, called MassHealth, began paying for drugs and other treatments to help smokers quit, including nicotine patches, gum and drugs. "Over 75,000 Medicaid subscribers used the [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-12-10T12:20:36-07:00December, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Cancer answer? Researchers are working on a more individual approach to each tumour

Source: macleans.ca By: Kate Lanau This summer, Vancouver cancer researchers announced a medical first. Presented with an extremely rare case of tongue cancer—it was so unusual there were no standard treatments to use—they sequenced the DNA of the patient’s tumour, and discovered similarities with another cancer (renal cell carcinoma, a type of kidney cancer) for which there’s a known therapy. The patient received drugs tailored to these results, and the cancer stopped growing for several months. Steven Jones, a molecular biologist with the B.C. Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre and one of two lead researchers on the study, calls it a breakthrough. It isn’t standard in hospitals to genetically sequence a patient’s tumour, but “the goal would be, maybe in 10 years, this would be routine,” he says. Dr. Leif Ellisen, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, is working to bring tumour genotyping from the lab into the clinic. He and a team have designed a system that can screen relatively large numbers of patients for a variety of mutations across different cancer genes. These genetic mutations are a tumour’s “Achilles’ heel,” noted a recent editorial in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. “Every tumour has a flaw,” says Ellisen, who’ll be discussing his work as part of the Scienta Health Series in Toronto on Oct. 7, and his goal is to find it. It’s the mantra of a growing number of researchers, who tout personalized medicine—treatments tailored to each individual—as the future of cancer care. Traditionally, cancer treatment [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-10-08T10:18:00-07:00October, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Up in smoke: health insurers hold billions in tobacco stocks

Source: Southernstudies.org Author: Desiree Evans A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that major U.S., Canadian and British life and health insurance companies are investing billions of dollars in tobacco company stock. Researchers first revealed that health and life insurance companies had major investments in tobacco companies in 1995 in an article in the British medical journal Lancet. More than 10 years later, insurance companies are still deeply invested in "big" tobacco, despite the national calls upon them to divest. "Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people's health," said Wesley Boyd, the new report's lead author and a faculty member of Harvard Medical School. "It's clear their top priority is making money, not safe-guarding people's well-being." The report found that seven health and life-insurance companies in both the United States and overseas have nearly $4.5 billion invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco. "Although investing in tobacco while selling life or health insurance may seem self-defeating, insurance firms have figured out ways to profit from both," Boyd said. "Insurers exclude smokers from coverage or, more commonly, charge them higher premiums. Insurers profit -- and smokers lose -- twice over." The study highlights New Jersey-based Prudential Financial Inc., which sells life insurance and long-term disability coverage. With total tobacco holdings of $264.3 million, Prudential Financial is a major investor in three tobacco firms, including America's biggest cigarette [...]

Charlotte Parker2009-06-19T07:41:28-07:00June, 2009|Oral Cancer News|