2/25/2005 Andrew Pollack New York Times (nytimes.com) Chinese biotechnology companies have long copied American drugs for use in their home markets. But one Chinese imitator may now save a novel cancer treatment from oblivion after it was abandoned by its American developer. Shanghai Sunway Biotech, a biotechnology company in Shanghai, has licensed worldwide rights to the therapy from Onyx Pharmaceuticals, based in Emeryville, Calif., people at both companies said. It is a sign that China is plowing ahead in certain areas of medicine that are regarded more cautiously in the United States. The therapy uses a virus that has been genetically modified to attack cancer cells but avoid normal cells. The treatment, called Onyx-015, elicited great interest among cancer researchers a few years ago when it showed the ability to shrink tumors in midstage clinical trials. But there were challenges delivering the therapy to tumors because the immune system attacks the virus. Some scientists also considered the treatment a form of gene therapy, a technique that fell into disfavor after the death of a teenager in a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Onyx stopped work on the virus treatment in 2003 to devote its money to a more conventional cancer drug that is now in late stage trials with Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company. Onyx could not find a partner willing to pay for further development of the virus therapy. Unbeknownst to Onyx, however, Sunway researchers duplicated its approach after reading a paper published by Onyx scientists [...]

2/24/2005 Bowling Green, OH Laura Collins Bowling Green State University News (BGNews.com) University graduate student Michelle Grindstaff presented "Women, Smoking and Advertising: Have We Come a Long Way, Baby?" yesterday to students and faculty members in Hanna Hall. The presentation, a part of the Women's Center's Brown Bag Lunch series, discussed strategies tobacco companies use in their advertisements to entice female consumers. The pressure to be thin and womens want for gender equality are two of the issues that cigarette advertisements focus on when selling their product to women, Grindstaff said. The media also plays a large role in creating so-called beauty and gender norms that unrealistically portray women's bodies in society, she said. For example, the average model is 5-foot-11-inch and 117 pounds, while the average woman is 5-foot-4-inch and 140 pounds. Tobacco companies use the fact that many women are looking for ways to lose weight, by healthy and unhealthy means, as a marketing tool, she said. "Smoking is one example of the destructive behaviors encouraged in the media to achieve unrealistic standards of beauty for women," she said. The other common theme that appears in cigarette ads is that smoking promotes gender equality. It sends that message that if you smoke, you'll be one of the guys, Grindstaff said. She also discussed ads that target women by using the phrase "find your voice." Since it has often been a metaphor for speaking out, it looks like it promotes gender equality, she said. "You can get throat cancer [...]

2/24/2005 Angela Stewart The Star Ledger (www.nj.com/news/ledger) A newly awarded $1.2 million federal grant will help researchers unlock the mysteries behind why minorities in New Jersey suffer worse cancer outcomes than whites, with interventions developed to alleviate those causes, officials announced yesterday at a Jersey City news conference. The three-year grant, awarded by the National Institutes of Health, will establish a Center for Excellence in Health Disparities, to be led by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark. The university will collaborate with two other institutions -- the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick and New Jersey City University in Jersey City-- on7 the project that will, among other things, seek to find the underlying causes of cancer disparities. "New Jersey is the most racially and ethnically diverse state in the nation and is consistently ranked among the top 10 states in the nation with the highest cancer morbidity and mortality among minority populations," said Rep. Robert Menendez (D-13th Dist. ), who helped secure the funding, along with Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Rep. Steven Rothman (D-9th Dist.). African-American men in New Jersey are more than twice as likely as white men to die from prostate cancer, said Diane Brown, who heads UMDNJ's Institute for the Elimination of Health Disparities, founded in 2001. The new program, initially targeting its outreach in Newark and Jersey City, will build upon the efforts already underway at UMDNJ, where a cancer center is set to open on the [...]

2/24/2005 Jana Rieger et al. Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2005;131:140-145 Objective: To assess swallowing outcomes in patients with oropharyngeal carcinoma in relation to the Seikaly-Jha procedure for submandibular gland transfer (SJP). The SJP has recently been described as beneficial in the prevention of xerostomia induced by radiation therapy in patients with head and neck cancer. Design: Inception cohort. Setting: University-affiliated primary care center. Patients: A phase 2 clinical trial was conducted from February 1, 1999, through February 28, 2002, to evaluate SJP in patients with head and neck cancer. During that period, a consecutive sample of 51 patients who underwent surgical resection and reconstruction with a radial forearm free flap for oropharyngeal carcinoma were referred for functional assessment of swallowing after completion of adjuvant radiation therapy. At 6 months after surgery, swallowing assessments for 24 patients were available. Intervention: The cohort of 24 patients included 13 who had preservation of 1 submandibular gland (SJP group) and 11 who did not (control group). Main Outcome Measures: Quantitative and qualitative aspects of swallowing were obtained to determine whether patients in the SJP group performed more optimally than those in the control group. Results: Baseline and stimulated salivary flow rates were significantly different between groups. Patients in the SJP group were able to move the bolus through the oral cavity and into the pharynx faster than those in the control group. In addition, patients in the SJP group swallowed less often per bolus than patients in the control group. The complete swallowing [...]

2/23/2005 News-Medical.net For dry mouth sufferers Saliwell’s innovative patented devices brings welcome relief by restoring natural saliva production through electro-stimulation. Most of us may suffer dry mouth from time to time. But for 80 million people in the developed world it is a permanent condition caused by a lack of lubrication in the mouth. With IST programme funding Saliwell has developed devices that stimulate saliva production. “Our devices apply a low energy level of electricity to the right nerves that lead to a higher level of saliva secretion,” says Dr Andy Wolff, Saliwell project coordinator at Assuta Medical Centers in Israel. Their removable device, GenNarino, is custom made which sufferers wear whenever they need it. Dentists make an impression of the patient’s mouth and send it to the manufacturer, which in turn embeds the circuitry between two sheets of dental material and returns the device to the dentist. The patient recharges the battery through the year using the Saliwell tester and recharger, and returns the GenNarino once a year to the manufacturer to fabricate a new one or install fresh batteries, offering a kind of permanent service. There are no side affects to the electricity and they are now conducting double blind placebo controlled clinical trials. After about 200 experiments they have found a significant increase in saliva secretion and relief to the patients. Alongside the clinical trials there have been questionnaires. The findings are positive with no complaints, despite it being a prosthetic that fits in the mouth, says [...]

2/18/2005 Houston, TX Adam S. Garden Journal of Clinical Oncology, Vol 23, No 6 (February 20), 2005: pp. 1059-1060 Nasopharynx cancer is a disease known for chemosensitivity compared with its counterparts in the head and neck, and is also notorious for a greater incidence of systemic spread compared with squamous cancers arising from other head and neck sites. Thus, the appeal of systemic therapies to treat this disease is great. In the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Chua et al1 report a form of meta-analysis evaluating cisplatin-based induction therapy for nasopharynx cancer. By pooling the data from the two largest trials exploring the role of induction chemotherapy, it was hoped that the combination of two independently negative trials would gain sufficient statistical power to result in a positive result. Alas, with respect to overall survival, the overall trial results remain negative. The current analysis adds to the growing database of neoadjuvant chemotherapy trials in head and neck cancer that have not demonstrated a survival advantage for the use of induction therapy. These results are consistent with the Meta-Analysis of Chemotherapy in Head and Neck Cancer Collaborative Group's finding, which revealed no significant survival benefit associated with the use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy.2 In the 1990s, induction chemotherapy was a critical component in the management of patients when organ preservation was the goal. Often, survival equivalence was a satisfactory end point. The Veterans Affairs and European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer larynx preservation studies demonstrated that not [...]

2/18/2005 B Tokman, SE Gultekin, C Sezer, and R Alpar Saudi Med J, December 1, 2004; 25(12): 1922-30 Objective: Inactivation of p53 and p16 tumor suppressor genes, and apoptosis which is crucial in carcinogenesis have commonly been studied in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). However, their prognostic value has not yet been clearly established. Methods: This study was conducted in the Department of Oral Pathology, Faculty of Dentistry, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey during the period 2002 to 2003 on formalin-fixed paraffin embedded tissue specimens of 12 lip and 18 intraoral primary squamous cell carcinoma cases. The expression of p53 and p16 proteins were studied by immunohistochemistry, and the apoptosis by TdT-mediated dUTP-biotin nick end-labeling (TUNEL) methods. The possible prognostic value of p53, p16 expression and apoptotic index (AI) value in OSCC were examined on the basis of their correlation with mode of invasion (MI) grading system. Results: Seven lip (58%) and 9 intraoral cancer (50%) cases showed p53 positivity; where 5 lip (42%) and 15 intraoral cancer (83%) cases showed loss of p16 protein. P53 positive cases increased parallel to MI grade where the AI value decreased. There was not any correlation either between p16 expression and MI grade or AI value. The mean AI value was found as 1,884. Apoptotic index values were higher in invasive site of tumors, and it was statistically significant in MI grade 2 OSCC cases. Apoptotic index value of both central and invasive sites were lowest in MI grade 4 cases. Conclusion: The present [...]

2/18/2005 Houston, TX The Herald Democrat (www.heralddemocrat.com) A mostly harmless virus could play a vital role in the treatment of a certain form of throat cancer, according to researchers whose findings are published online at the website for Blood, the official journal of the American Society of Hematology. Carried in 90 percent of all people, the Epstein-Barr virus was recently found to produce antigens that may help patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a form of throat cancer common in North Africa and Southeast Asia. The discovery was made by researchers at the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), The Methodist Hospital and Texas Children's Hospital, all in Houston. "Radiation and chemotherapy, the traditional treatments for nasopharyngeal carcinoma, frequently fail and can cause severe long-term side effects," said Dr. Helen Heslop, professor of medicine and pediatrics at BCM as well as senior study author. "The results of this study demonstrate that these virus-specific T cells have activity in some patients with this cancer." In the study, patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma were given intravenous doses of specialized T cells that specifically targeted antigens produced by the Epstein-Barr virus, a member of the herpes family responsible for mononucleosis and commonly associated with this cancer's tumors. "There was a compelling need for therapies that could improve disease-free survival without severe toxicity," said Heslop. Six patients remain completely disease-free one to two years after the treatment. Two patients showed no response to the treatment.

2/18/2005 Laramie, WY Addicted to chew laramieboomerang.com The tender age of 13 is a time when children take their first step toward adulthood. It’s also a time when anything seems possible and consequences are not yet a priority in making decisions. Gruen Von Behren probably never could have fathomed that the choice he was about to make one night while camping with friends would have irreversible consequences. One of Gruen’s friends offered him some snuff that night, and he accepted. “I liked it. I liked the way tobacco made me feel. I liked the way tobacco tasted,” he said. Chewing tobacco was nothing more than a game at first, Gruen said, a game to see who could fit the biggest chew in their mouth, and who could hold it there the longest. Gruen said that he and his friends would see who would get sick from the tobacco, tease them for getting sick and then entice them to use more. “Here chew this. Now throw up. Blah,” Gruen said mimicking a puking noise. “Here, chew more, you idiot.” What started as a game quickly became an addiction, but no one could have known how quickly the addiction would create cancer in Gruen’s body. “Halfway through my junior year of high school, after only using tobacco for three years, I noticed a white spot developing on the side of my tongue where I’d been holding my dip in my lip,” he said. “I thought it was going to go away. Well, [...]

2/18/2005 Medical News Today (www.medicalnewstoday.com) In a new study of 5,887 middle-aged smokers with mild lung disease, those who were randomly assigned to a quit-smoking program had a lower death rate than those assigned to usual care, even though only 21.7 percent of them actually quit smoking. The annual death rates were 8.8 per 1000 participants in the quit-smoking program and 10.4 per 1000 in the usual care group. The annual death rates for those who actually quit was even more positive: 6.0 per 1000 patients compared with 11.0 per 1000 in those who did not quit smoking. Overall, the death rate of those in both groups who were able to quit smoking was 46 percent lower than those who did not quit. The study, "The Effects of a Smoking Cessation Intervention on 14.5-year Morality," is the first experimental study to show that stopping smoking adds years to life. It is published in the Feb. 15, 2005, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The findings were based on data from the Lung Health Study. Randomized trials like the Lung Health Study are widely regarded as the gold standard for proof among clinical studies. "We know that people who smoke should quit smoking," said one of the study authors, John E. Connett, PhD, professor of biostatistics of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. "This study showed that with very simple lung function tests -- spirometry -- we can find people who can benefit the most from an intensive quit-smoking [...]