4/15/2002 Atlanta AP Each pack of cigarettes sold in the United States costs the nation $7 in medical care and lost productivity, the government said Thursday. The study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta put the nation's total cost of smoking at $3,391 a year for every smoker, or #157.7 billion. Health experts had previously estimated $96 billion. Americans buy about 22 billion packs of cigarettes annually. The CDC study is the first to establish a per-pack cost to the nation. The agency estimated the nation's smoking-related medical costs at $3.45 per pack, and said job productivity lost because of premature death from smoking amounted to $3.73 per pack, for a total of $7.18. "There's a big difference in the cost to society and what society is getting back in tax," said the CDC's Dr. Terry Pechacek. "We believe society is bearing a burden for the individual behavioral choices of the smokers." The CDC said is analyzed expenses, both personal and for the health-care industry, and used national medical surveys to calculate the costs to the nation. The agency also reported that smoking results in about 440,000 deaths a year in the United States, up from the government's previous figure of 430,000, established in the early 1990's. The new study was conducted from 1995 to 1999. A spokesman for tobacco giant Brown & Williamson objected that the study presents the figures in a vacuum, without comparing smoking to the financial burdens other people-nonsmokers with diabetes, for [...]

4/9/2002 San Francisco American Association for Cancer Research Recurrent head and neck cancer patients receiving higher dose of ADVEXIN® gene therapy in one study had a significant survival advantage when compared to a group of patients in another study receiving a lower dose of the drug, according to the results of two Phase 2 studies presented today at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Study results show that, for the first five months of the trial, patients in the ADVEXIN high-dose study were 50 percent more likely to live than those in the low-dose study. ADVEXIN, which combines a proprietary adenoviral vector with the p53 gene, is the lead product candidate of Introgen Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: INGN). "We are extremely encouraged by these results demonstrating a significant survival advantage in patients who received a high dose of ADVEXIN," said Max W. Talbott, Ph.D., Introgen's senior vice president of worldwide commercial development. "There have been drugs approved to treat cancer that demonstrated a less beneficial survival advantage in clinical trials." Patients receiving high-dose ADVEXIN had a median survival advantage 2.4 months longer (189 days vs. 114 days) than those receiving a low-dose treatment with the drug. Dosing in the low-dose study was 50 times lower than dosing in the high-dose trial. Dosing in the high-dose trial was consistent with dosing in Introgen's current phase 3 studies of ADVEXIN in the treatment of head and neck cancer. Data from the same studies also show a 60 percent improvement [...]

4/8/2002 Washington DC Reuters A genetically engineered virus designed to home in on and kill cancer cells may be safe to test in patients whose cancer has spread, researchers said on Monday. The latest in a series of experiments using Onyx-015, a cold virus altered so that it infects and kills only cancer cells and leaves healthy cells alone, produced positive results on liver cancer, the researchers said. Richmond, California-based Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. has been testing the virus for several years, using a variety of novel approaches such as putting it into a mouthwash to treat oral cancer and injecting it into tumors. In the latest experiment they infused the virus into the livers of patients whose cancers had spread there. "Rather than injecting it directly into the tumor using a syringe and needle, where it might not get distributed evenly, we injected it into the artery, so that the flow of blood carries it throughout the liver," Dr. Daniel Sze of Stanford University Medical Center in California, who helped lead the study, said in a telephone interview. The phase I study was meant only to test the safety of the approach, and Sze told a meeting in Baltimore of the Society of Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology it seemed safe. They tested 35 patients whose gastrointestinal cancer, mostly colon cancer, had spread into the liver. None could be cured by surgery and chemotherapy had stopped working for them, so they were dying of their cancer. Not only was the treatment [...]