No ref’s return as special as Corrente’s

Source: sportsillustrated.cnn.com Author: Peter King The voice of Tony Corrente was ebullient, as ebullient as a man who stared down his own mortality within the past few months and lived to tell about it. "How are you doing?'' I asked Corrente an hour after he refereed his first game -- Niners-Jets at the Meadowlands Sunday -- since his tongue and throat cancer eradication of last winter. "Wonderful, fantastic, perfect!'' he practically shouted into the phone. "Never been better, and I mean that. I am elated. I have a new lease on life." Corrente checked into the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston the day after his final game of the 2011 season -- the Detroit-New Orleans Wild Card game -- for treatment of a thumb-sized malignant tumor at the base of his tongue, where it connects with the back of his throat. He had 13 chemotherapy treatments and 33 zaps of radiation in a short period, to attack the tumor aggressively. Doctors told him if the tumor had been discovered as little as three weeks later the news would have been very dark for him. But they began treatment in time, and in the spring, they found that the tumor was under control. He's had two thorough checkups since, and both have given him a clean bill of health. This is why, as the National Anthem played Sunday in New Jersey, Corrente said a long prayer of thanks for his doctors and for those who supported him during the ordeal. [...]

Growing ‘mini tumors’ from patient’s cancer could lead to custom treatments

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com Author: Marilynn Marchione It's a medical nightmare: a 24-year-old man endures 350 surgeries since childhood to remove growths that keep coming back in his throat and have spread to his lungs, threatening his life. Now doctors have found a way to help him by way of a scientific coup that holds promise for millions of cancer patients. The bizarre case is the first use in a patient of a new discovery: how to keep ordinary and cancerous cells alive indefinitely in the lab. The discovery allows doctors to grow "mini tumors" from each patient's cancer in a lab dish, then test various drugs or combinations on them to see which works best. It takes only a few cells from a biopsy and less than two weeks to do, with materials and methods common in most hospitals. Although the approach needs much more testing against many different types of cancer, researchers think it could offer a cheap, simple way to personalize treatment without having to analyze each patient's genes. "We see a lot of potential for it," said one study leader, Dr. Richard Schlegel, pathology chief at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington. "Almost everyone could do it easily." An independent expert agreed. For infections, it's routine to grow bacteria from a patient in lab dishes to see which antibiotics work best, Dr. George Q. Daley of Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute said in an email. "But this has never been possible with cancer [...]

2012-09-28T07:16:28-07:00September, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Demystifying the immortality of cancer cells

Source: http://medicalxpress.com/ Author: In cancer cells, normal mechanisms governing the cellular life cycle have gone haywire. Cancer cells continue to divide indefinitely, without ever dying off, thus creating rapidly growing tumors. Swiss scientists have discovered a protein complex involved this deregulated process, and hope to be able to exploit it to stop tumor formation in its tracks. All our cells come equipped with an automatic self-destruct mechanism; they are programmed to die after a certain number of divisions. This internal clock is of great interest to cancer researchers, because most forms of cancer exhibit a defect in this innate timing mechanism. Cancer cells continue to divide indefinitely, long past the moment at which a normal cell would self-destruct. A team of researchers from professor Joachim Lingner’s laboratory at EPFL has learned how this defect is regulated in a tumor. Post-doctoral researcher Liuh-Yow Chen led the team in publishing an article appearing in the journal Nature on the 4th of July 2012. Their hope is that the discovery will provide new targets for drug therapies to combat the deadly disease. Cellular immortality, which is responsible for cancer formation, hearkens back to a critical function of the cells of the developing embryo. At the ends of every chromosome there is a special sequence of DNA known as a telomere, whose length is governed by the telomerase enzyme. This sequence represents the lifespan of the cell. Every time the cell divides, it is shortened, and when the telomere finally runs out, [...]

200 Years of surgery: cutting to cure has come a long way

Source: abcnews.go.com Author: Katie Moisse The three-and-a-half-inch tumor in Cynthia Miller's throat threatened to choke her, leaving her no choice but to have it removed. "I had no idea I was even sick," said Miller, 55, who lives in Maitland, Fla. "I woke up in the middle of the night coughing. … The next thing I knew they were booking emergency surgery." Instead of radical surgery -- which would involved cutting her face, pulling teeth and breaking her jaw -- Miller had her tumor removed through her mouth by a miniature robotic arm guided by the surgeon. "With the robot, there are no cuts anywhere. No breathing tube, no broken bones," said Dr. Bert O'Malley, who pioneered the procedure at the University of Pennsylvania's Head and Neck Cancer Center in Philadelphia. "We go in through the mouth with a high-magnification 3-D camera and very small instruments, like a surgeon's fingers but very tiny, and we're able to remove the tumor without the side effects of traditional surgery." Side effects like spasms, difficulty with swallowing and speech, not to mention chronic pain. "The more you disrupt and injure tissue, the greater the risk of dysfunction and chronic problems," said O'Malley. Today's minimally invasive surgery is far different from the procedures of 200 years ago, when surgeons hacked through skin, muscle and bone briskly and brutally without anesthesia or antisepsis. "Pain and the always-looming problem of infection restricted the extent of a surgeon's reach," Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and [...]

Viruses recruited as killers of tumors

Source: nytimes.com Author: Rachel Nuwer In 1951, a 4-year-old boy with leukemia contracted chickenpox. His liver and spleen, swollen by the cancer, soon returned to normal, and his elevated blood cell count fell to that of a healthy child. His doctors at the Laboratory of Experimental Oncology in San Francisco were thrilled by his sudden remission, but the blessing was short-lived. After one month, his leukemia returned and progressed rapidly until the child’s death. In the early 1900s, not much could be done for cancer patients. Unless surgeons could excise a tumor, the disease typically spelled a swift and inevitable end. But in dozens of published cases over the years, doctors noticed a peculiar trend: Struggling cancer patients sometimes enjoyed a brief reprieve from their malignancies when they caught a viral infection. It was not a coincidence. Common viruses sometimes attack tumor cells, researchers discovered. For decades, they tried to harness this phenomenon, to transform it into a cancer treatment. Now, after a long string of failures, they are nearing success with viruses engineered to kill cancer. “It’s a very exciting time,” said Dr. Robert Martuza, chief neurosurgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. “I think it will work out in some tumor, with some virus.” Candidates are already in advanced trials, he noted. Cancer cells are able to replicate wildly, but there’s a trade-off: They cannot ward off infection as effectively as healthy cells. So scientists have been looking for ways to [...]

Post-transplant head and neck tumors tallied

Source: www.familypracticenews.com Author: Damian McNamara, Family Practice News Digital Network Patients who have undergone solid organ transplantation are at greater risk for subsequent tumor development, and head and neck cancers can be particularly aggressive, according to results of a single-institution study. Dr. Robert H. Deeb and his associates at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit studied 3,639 patients who underwent solid organ transplantation between January 1990 and December 2011. By retrospectively searching electronic medical records, they identified 95 people who developed cutaneous, salivary gland, or mucosal malignancies. They found a 2.1% incidence of cutaneous cancers and a 0.5% incidence of noncutaneous head and neck cancers in this population. Despite a relatively low overall 2.6% incidence, there are reasons for concern, Dr. Deeb said at the Triological Society’s Combined Sections Meeting, which was jointly sponsored by the Triological Society and the American College of Surgeons. When cutaneous cancers did occur, they were more aggressive and were associated with shorter 1-year survival rates. Henry Ford Transplant Institute maintains a noncutaneous tumor registry. This allowed the researchers to compare survival and other factors. Compared with the "nontransplant tumor registry in our institution, we found significantly fewer patients were alive at 1 year," Dr. Deeb said. Specifically, 55% of posttransplant patients with these cancers survived to 1 year, compared with 81% of nontransplant patients. There were no significant differences between groups in terms of age, sex, stage at diagnosis, or 5-year survival. More than half (52%) of the patients who developed skin cancers had multiple [...]

2012-02-19T11:10:20-07:00February, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Computer scientists may have what it takes to help cure cancer

Source: nytimes.com Author: David Patterson The war against cancer is increasingly moving into cyberspace. Computer scientists may have the best skills to fight cancer in the next decade — and they should be signing up in droves. One reason to enlist: Cancer is so pervasive. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Emperor of All Maladies,” the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee writes that cancer is a disease of frightening fractions: One-fourth of deaths in the United States are caused by cancer; one-third of women will face cancer in their lifetimes; and so will half of men. As he wrote, “The question is not if we will get this immortal disease, but when.” Dr. Mukherjee noted that surprisingly recently, researchers discovered that cancer is a genetic disease, caused primarily by mutations in our DNA. As well as providing the molecular drivers of cancer, changes to the DNA also cause the diversity within a cancer tumor that makes it so hard to eradicate completely. The hope is that by sequencing the genome of a cancer tumor, doctors will soon be able to prescribe a personalized, targeted therapy to stop a cancer’s growth or to cure it. According to Walter Isaacson’s new biography “Steve Jobs,” a team of medical researchers sequenced the Apple executive’s pancreatic cancer tumor and used that information to decide which drug therapies to use. Since Mr. Jobs’s cancer had already spread, this effort was even more challenging. Each sequencing cost $100,000. Fortunately for the rest of us, the cost of turning [...]

2011-12-08T10:17:58-07:00December, 2011|Oral Cancer News|

Using a lab-grown trachea, surgeons conduct the world’s first synthetic organ transplant

Source: www.popsci.com Author: Clay Dillow Surgeons working at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden have taken a huge step forward for regenerative medicine by successfully executing the world’s first synthetic organ transplant. The donor-less transplant saved the life of a 36-year-old cancer patient, who is doing well now after having received a new windpipe grown from his own stem cells. This story is about as international as it gets: The Eritrean patient, Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, was pursuing his doctorate in geology in Iceland when his trachea was consumed by an inoperable tumor that grew so bad that it was actually blocking his breathing. So 3-D scans of his windpipe were sent to scientists at University College London, which crafted a glass scaffold that was a perfect match for Beyene’s trachea and two main bronchi. The scaffold was in turn was sent to Sweden, where it was soaked in stem cells from Beyene’s own bone marrow. The stem cells took hold and within just two days had filled the scaffold, creating a new trachea that is, biologically speaking, Beyene’s own tissue. A 12-hour operation by an Italian surgeon specializing in trachea operations removed Beyene’s windpipe and all signs of the cancer and then replaced it with the new, lab-grown organ. That was a month ago. Today, Beyene is recovering well. Because the organ was grown from his own cells, there is no risk of his body rejecting it and no need for the harsh regimen of anti-rejection drugs that usually go hand [...]

Cancer vaccines make progress in combating disease

Source: http://www.masshightech.com/ Author: Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death two years ago from the deadly form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), refocused attention on how slowly treatments have progressed since former President Richard Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971. But a new form of treatment that goes beyond oncology drugs and surgery is now coming of age: cancer vaccines. At the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago — a major forum for cancer researchers — several companies and research groups reported progress on cancer vaccines, including a New England company with a shot for GBM. Agenus Inc. of Lexington reported its Prophage G-200 almost doubled the longevity of patients with recurring GBM to 11 months. That’s good news to patients with that particularly aggressive form of cancer, which also killed composer George Gershwin and music synthesizer legend Robert Moog. Vaccines represent a relatively new approach to fighting the spread of cancer, having appeared in the last decade. The basic concept is similar to a vaccine for a disease like measles: an injection in the arm induces an immune response that helps the body fight a particular pathogen, in this case, a cancer. An effective immune response would then shrink tumors and extend lives. Research and Markets estimates that the relatively new market for cancer vaccines could rise sharply to top $7 billion by 2015. The research company looked at six main categories of cancer vaccines: antigen/adjuvant, DNA, vector-based, tumor [...]

Michael Douglas Continues to Put Oral Cancer in the Spotlight

Source: Dr.Biscupid.com Actor Michael Douglas' recent revelation that he had stage IV oropharyngeal cancer has highlighted the growing incidence of oral cancer, and experts say dentists can help stem the alarming increase of the disease by checking for it during routine examinations. The actor's cancer included a walnut-sized tumor at the base of his tongue,  requiring radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and surgery. Douglas says his doctors told him he had an 80% survival rate if it hadn't spread to his lymph nodes. While tobacco was the prime cause of oral cancer in the past, recent studies have attributed the steady increase of the disease to the human papillomavirus (HPV16). There are approximately 130 versions of HPV but only nine cause cancers, and the HPV16 version causes almost half of the oral cancers in the U.S., said Brian Hill, executive director of the Oral Cancer Foundation. "Tobacco is no longer the only bad guy," he told DrBicuspid.com. “HPV16 is increasing in incidence as the causative etiology, and if it continues on this trend line, it will replace tobacco as the primary cause of oral cancers." Dentists can play a key role in catching the disease in its early stages if they check for it during examinations, Hill pointed out. "But many dentists think it's such a rare disease that they don't bother to screen for it," he said. "Most Americans have never even heard of oral cancer, but it's not as rare or uncommon as people would like to think it is. [...]

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