4/18/2007 St. Petersburg, FL John Barry St. Petersburg Times (www.sptimes.com) David Hastings doesn't fit the throat cancer profile. So he looked for answers and was surprised by what he found. During the grisly battle for his life, David Hastings played medical detective. He read everything he could find on what was trying to kill him. Nothing made sense. Hastings had throat cancer, mostly known for killing old people. Imagine an elderly soul addicted to cigarettes and alcohol for 40 years. There's a likely victim. Hastings didn't fit. He was 58. He looked 48. He hadn't smoked since college, and he doesn't drink. His chief addiction is cycling. He rides his bike about 100 miles per week. He'd never have guessed where he finally did fit in. He did not have an old smoker's disease, after all. His throat had been attacked by a cancer-causing virus infamous for killing women. It was HPV, the human papilloma virus, that causes most cervical cancers. HPV is the virus at the center of a national argument over preventive vaccinations of young girls. To his great surprise, Hastings discovered that this controversial women's vaccination plan aimed at ridding the world of HPV cancers may have started with the wrong gender. One day, the answer might be found here. A thousand Tampa men are currently participating in the world's largest study of male HPV infections. The National Institutes of Health has awarded the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa $10-million for the work. It involves [...]

4/18/2007 New York, NY staff Forbes.com Vaccines against deadly pancreatic and head and neck cancers are showing real promise and may one day become an important part of treatment, researchers report. Researchers are also confirming that cervical cancer vaccines are both highly effective and long-lasting, according to two other studies. All of the new findings were presented Tuesday at the American Association of Cancer Research's annual meeting in Los Angeles. In one report, a team led by Andrew Lepisto, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, presented the results of a phase I trial of a vaccine for pancreatic cancer. In that trial, Lepisto's team gave an immune cell-based vaccine to 12 cancer patients who underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest malignancies, because it is often caught too late "Patients who are eligible for surgery represent about 20 percent of all pancreatic cancer patients," Lepisto said during a teleconference. The five-year survival rate after surgery is only about 20 percent, he added. "The goal of the vaccine was to raise a strong immune response to prevent the cancer from coming back," Lepisto explained. "We found that if we did the surgery and followed up with the vaccine, we extended patient's lives from a 20 percent five-year survival rate to over 42 percent," he said. "There are five patients who are long-term survivors." Lepisto is planning to use the five surviving patients to understand how the immune vaccine extended [...]

4/18/2007 web-based article Gabriela Studer et al. Radiat Oncol, April 12, 2007; 2(1): 16 Background: Except for early T1,2 N0 stages, the prognosis for patients with oral cavity cancer (OCC) is reported to be worse than for carcinoma in other sites of the head and neck (HNC). The aim of this work was to assess disease outcome in OCC following IMRT. Between January 2002 and January 2007, 346 HNC patients have been treated with curative intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) at the Department of Radiation Oncology, University Hospital Zurich. Fifty eight of these (16%) were referred for postoperative (28) or definitive (30) radiation therapy of OCC. 40 of the 58 OCC patients (69%) presented with locally advanced T3/4 or recurred lesions. Doses between 60 and 70Gy were applied, combined with simultaneous cisplatin based chemotherapy in 78%. Outcome analyses were performed using Kaplan Meier curves. In addition, comparisons were performed between this IMRT OCC cohort and historic in-house cohorts of 33 conventionally irradiated (3DCRT) and 30 surgery only patients treated over the last 10 years. Results: OCC patients treated with postoperative IMRT showed the highest local control (LC) rate of all assessed treatment sequence subgroups (92% LC at 2 years). Historic postoperative 3DCRT patients and patients treated with surgery alone reached LC rates of ~70-80%. Definitively irradiated patients revealed poorest LC rates with ~30 and 40% following 3DCRT and IMRT, respectively. T1 stage resulted in an expectedly significantly higher LC rate (95%, n=19, p<0.05) than T2-4 and recurred stages (LC ~50-60%, [...]

4/17/2007 web-based article Daved E. Schuller, MD et al. Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2007;133:320-326 Objective: To determine the feasibility of, compliance with, and long-term survival with intensification treatment regimens for patients with advanced, resectable, previously untreated head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Design: Prospective phase 2 clinical trial (3 similar, consecutively evolved trials). Setting: Comprehensive Cancer Center–Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, The Ohio State University. Patients: One hundred twenty-three patients (median age, 60 years; range, 30-78 years) with previously untreated, resectable, advanced squamous cell carcinomas of the oral cavity, oropharynx, or hypopharynx. Interventions: Perioperative cisplatin chemoradiotherapy, surgical resection with intraoperative radiotherapy, and postoperative paclitaxel and cisplatin chemoradiotherapy. Main Outcome Measures: The feasibility, compliance, and long-term survival associated with the 3 intensification regimens. Results: Compliance with all 3 intensification regimens averaged 61% (75/123). Patient-directed noncompliance occurred in 16 patients (13%). The average locoregional (112/123, 91%) and systemic (106/123, 86%) disease control rates were excellent. Overall long-term disease-specific survival was 73%. Median time at risk was 62.5 months (range, 1 day to 100.4 months). Conclusions: The intensification regimens result in excellent disease control rates and long-term survival in this particular patient population. Future evolution of these regimens will include some modifications to further decrease toxic effects followed by phase 2 multi-institutional trials to determine whether the single-institutional experience can be duplicated. The results of these studies will determine whether phase 3 trials can be proposed. Authors: David E. Schuller, MD; Enver Ozer, MD; Amit Agrawal, [...]

4/16/2007 Gloversville, NY Richard Nilsen The Leader-Herald (www.leaderherald.com) Sharlee Ringer of Mayfield said she hopes by telling her story she may be able to help someone. Ringer, a 35-year-old married mother of five who is active in the community, recently had part of her tongue removed and was having her tonsils removed today in an effort to stop the spread of the oral cancer she was diagnosed with Jan. 27. “I had noticed a lesion on my tongue last April, but I thought it was just a cold sore,” Ringer said. Ringer questioned if the cold sore was something more when it didn’t go away. But since she has never smoked or been exposed to other typical things that lead to oral cancer, she put off having the sore looked at. “When I finally got an appointment to have it removed, I had to postpone due to a respiratory infection,” she said. Each delay could worsen the condition, but at 35 and with no history of smoking, she didn’t imagine the problem could be cancer. “When the doctor called me in to a conference room to discuss the lesion he had removed, I knew it was cancer,” she said. The sore was found to be squamous cell carcinoma, the most common form of oral cancer. Ringer said she wanted to tell her story in order to make others aware. April is National Cancer Control Month. She said she’d like to get the word out because it is difficult to get [...]

4/16/2007 web-based article staff SpiritIndia.com A simple oral rinse could detect the early development of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, according to researchers at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. Their strategy involves the detection of CD44, a protein biomarker for HNSCC tumors, combined with the detection of cancer-related altered DNA, and could reliably distinguish cancer from benign diseases. Currently, only 50 percent of head and neck cancer patients are cured of the disease. While late-stage HNSCC has a poor prognosis, cure rates exceed 80 percent if caught early enough. "Head and neck cancers are devastating for all patients. They are particularly challenging for the poor and disadvantaged, who often do not have the adequate, regular care that makes early detection more likely," said Elizabeth Franzmann, M.D., assistant professor of otolaryngology at Miami. "Our study has shown that an oral rinse test, simple enough to be administered at any community health center, is likely to detect cancer about 90 percent of the time." While CD44 appears on the surface of cells in healthy tissue, it is elevated at least seven- fold times in head and neck cancer. Dr. Franzmann and her colleagues theorized that CD44 could be detected in an oral rinse, which would flush out the CD44 protein by washing over the cellular membranes of interest in the throat and mouth. According to Dr. Franzmann, their study began with an attempt to find if soluble CD44, alone, was sufficient to distinguish between cancer and other diseases. [...]

4/16/2007 New Rochelle, NY press release Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (ww.genengnews.com) The Food and Drug Administration recently gave LED Dental Inc. clearance to use its VELscope Oral Cancer Screening System to assist dentists in detecting cancerous growths that may be missed with traditional examinations, and also help surgeons ensure that all diseased tissue is successfully removed when excising cancerous lesions. This approval is based on studies conducted by scientists at the British Columbia Cancer Agency. The studies reported cases that demonstrated VELscope's ability to facilitate the detection of lesions that were not visible by an expert under conventional white light visualization. Oral Cancer: The Forgotten Disease Oral cancer is one of the few forms of cancer that have not experienced a significantly decreased mortality rate in the past 30 years. Deaths from oral cancer are higher than from cervical, testicular, laryngeal or thyroid cancer. It is estimated that over 34,000 Americans will develop oral cancer in 2007, and that only about half of them will be alive in five years. One American dies of this disease every hour of every day. The traditional profile of an oral cancer victim is that of a heavy user of tobacco and alcohol who is at least 40 years old. However, the number of victims who do not fit this profile has been growing at an alarming rate in recent years. One reason may be the growth in the occurrence of the human papilloma virus (HPV), one strain of which is now thought [...]

4/15/2007 Los Angeles, CA BERNHARD G ZIMMERMANNa, NOH JIN PARKa AND DAVID T WONGabcde Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1098: 184–191 (2007) Saliva, the most accessible and noninvasive biofluid of our body, harbors a wide spectrum of biological analytes informative for clinical diagnostic applications. While proteomic constituents are a logical first choice as salivary diagnostic analytes, genomic targets have emerged as highly informative and discriminatory. This awareness, coupled with the ability to harness genomic information by high-throughput technology platforms such as genome-wide microarrays, ideally positions salivary genomic targets for exploring the value of saliva for detection of specific disease states and augmenting the diagnostic and discriminatory value of the saliva proteome for clinical applications. Buccal cells and saliva have been used as sources of genomic DNA for a variety of clinical and forensic applications. For discovery of disease targets in saliva, the recent realization that there is a transcriptome in saliva presented an additional target for oral diagnostics. All healthy subjects evaluated have approximately 3,000 different mRNA molecules in their saliva. Almost 200 of these salivary mRNAs are present in all subjects. Exploration of the clinical utility of the salivary transcriptome in oral cancer subjects shows that four salivary mRNAs (OAZ, SAT, IL8, and IL1b) collectively have a discriminatory power of 91% sensitivity and specificity for oral cancer detection. Data are also now in place to validate the presence of unique diagnostic panels of salivary mRNAs in subjects with Sjögren's disease. Authors: Bernhard G. Zimmeran(a), Noh Jin Park(a), David T. Wont [...]

4/4/2007 Baltimore, MD press release Johns Hopkins Medicine (www.hopkinscancercenter.net) For Dr. Maura Gillison the human papillomavirus was a smoking gun. Having proven that the virus is present in tumor cells of a subset of patients with head and neck cancer—those patients that didn’t fit the risk profile for the disease—this new faculty member has now set out to discover how this new finding will affect screening, prognosis and treatment of head and neck cancers. There is a common factor among one quarter of all head and neck cancers. It is the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV). Maura Gillison, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology, intrigued by evidence of HPV DNA in head and neck cancers wanted to find out what role this virus might be playing in this form of cancer. “The fact that the virus had been detected in some head and neck cancers was no secret, but most scientists attributed it to laboratory contamination. I couldn’t help but wonder what if it wasn’t,” she says. When she began the experiment, Gillison truly expected the results to be negative, that she would not find HPV in the tumor cells. Instead her studies not only confirmed the presence of HPV, but also uncovered another interesting outcome. She was able to prove infection with the virus was associated with head and neck cancers, primarily oropharyngeal cancers, including those of the pharynx, tonsils, and base of tongue. And to her surprise, she also found that these patients typically fared better than those [...]

4/14/2007 Toronto, Ontario, Canada Barbara Turnbull Toronto Star (www.thestar.com) Hi-tech radiation imaging, 3-D planning increase intensity with fewer downsides Once his mask is snapped to the table, Ross Harrison can barely blink. That's crucial to the course of radiation he'll finish at Princess Margaret Hospital in a few weeks. It follows surgery that removed a cancerous growth from his neck last February. Harrison is one of approximately 7,500 patients who receive radiation here each year, one of the largest and most respected cancer treatment facilities in the world. "They certainly go out of their way to make people comfortable," says the 65-year-old retired forestry products specialist. Harrison expects to fully recover, and anticipates a summer of golf, gardening and cycling when he returns home to his wife, a retired schoolteacher, and their two cats in Sault St. Marie. Almost 400 professionals plan and deliver radiation to cancer patients at PMH each year. The process begins with physicians, who spend hours on a computerized planning system with multiple images of the body site to be radiated. Slice by slice, millimetre by millimetre, a pattern for radiation – which can take between one and 42 treatments – is painstakingly contoured for each patient. "There is a lot of judgment," says Dr. Mary Gospodarowicz, PMH's head of radiation medicine. New technology allows the precise shaping of radiation beams to the tumour site, which minimizes the volume of tissue being treated, reducing toxicity and sparing healthy cells. "If you have a normal structure next [...]