1/2/2007 Cambridge, MA Kevin Bullis Technology Review (www.technologyreview.com) The first in a new generation of nanotechnology-based cancer treatments will likely begin clinical trials in 2007, and if the promise of animal trials carries through to human trials, these treatments will transform cancer therapy. By replacing surgery and conventional chemotherapy with noninvasive treatments targeted at cancerous tumors, this nanotech approach could reduce or eliminate side effects by avoiding damage to healthy tissue. It could also make it possible to destroy tumors that are inoperable or won't respond to current treatment. One of these new approaches places gold-coated nanoparticles, called nanoshells, inside tumors and then heats them with infrared light until the cancer cells die. Because the nanoparticles also scatter light, they could be used to image tumors as well. Mauro Ferrari, a leader in the field of nanomedicine and professor of bioengineering at the University of Texas Health Science Center, says this is "very exciting" technology. "With chemotherapy," Ferrari says, "we carpet bomb the patient, hoping to hit the lesions, the little foci of disease. To be able to shine the light only where you want this thing to heat up is a great advantage." Although several groups are now working on similar localized treatments, Naomi Halas and Jennifer West have led the way in this area, and their work is the farthest along. (See "Nano Weapons Join the Fight Against Cancer.") Nearly ten years ago, Halas, professor of chemistry and electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, developed a precise [...]

1/1/2007 London, England Fionna McCrae www.dailymail.co.uk A quick and easy mouthwash test for hard-to-diagnose cancers of the head and neck is being developed by scientists. The kit - which looks for telltale signs of the disease in cells from the inside of a person's cheeks - has proved more than 80 per cent accurate at distinguishing healthy people from cancer sufferers. Such a "gargle and spit" test could prove invaluable in diagnosing the cancers which affect more than 7,000 Britons a year - and kill 2,500. High-profile sufferers of head and neck cancers have included the journalist, John Diamond, who suffered from throat cancer and George Harrison, who suffered both neck and throat cancer. They both died in 2001. The cancers, which include mouth, nose, throat, ear and eye tumours, are hard to diagnose and difficult to treat. Many are not spotted until the cancer has spread and a third of patients die within a year of diagnosis. Surgery can be disfiguring and lead to problems with speech, hearing or eating and just 40 per cent of sufferers are still alive five years after diagnosis. Early diagnosis would allow treatment to start at a time when it is most likely to be effective. The test, being developed in the U.S., picks up important genetic changes linked to head and neck cancer. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, identified the abnormalities after studying the genetics of hundreds of cancer sufferers and healthy people. The volunteers were asked to gargle [...]

1/1/2007 Washington, D.C. Lauran Neergaard MyWay News (apnews.myway.com) Reluctant to get a second opinion? Consider this: Over half of breast cancer patients had their initial treatment changed when they sought a review at a specialty center. But the question remains whether everybody with cancer really needs to go shopping for a second opinion. And if the first two doctors disagree, do you need a tiebreaker? Better than serial doc-shopping may be what Dr. Michael Sabel, a University of Michigan breast cancer surgeon, calls the team approach. It's where specialists in different aspects of cancer care - the radiologist and pathologist, surgeon, medical oncologist and radiation oncologist - all get together, usually with the patient, to reread all the tests and hash out the best treatment. That, not run-of-the-mill second opinions, is what Sabel set out to study when he examined what happened to 149 breast cancer patients who, in one year alone, came to Michigan's Comprehensive Cancer Center after being diagnosed, biopsied and getting a treatment recommended from a doctor elsewhere. "This was very eye-opening," he says of the results. Now he wonders, "Is there a benefit to the multidisciplinary approach upfront, rather than seeing a surgeon, then going to the next doctor, then to the next doctor?" The study examined just recommendations for initial surgical treatment, not later chemotherapy or radiation - yet 52 percent of the women had one or more changes urged by the specialty tumor board, Sabel reported in the journal Cancer. Sometimes it was because [...]