Month: March 2016

Groundbreaking Brain Cancer Discovery May Lead To New Mesothelioma Treatment

• Nancy Meredith
• Featured News

Glioblastoma, a brain cancer, is highly aggressive and has  limited treatment options. Although researchers have been diligent in their work to find a new, effective treatment, there has been no significant breakthrough in treatment for the cancer for decades. Now, researchers believe they may have found a way to turn a patient’s skin cells into cancer killing cells, leading to a “groundbreaking discovery” for brain cancer patients.

Glioblastama is a highly aggressive cancer with cells that quickly reproduce due to the large network of blood vessels found within the brain. Like pleural mesothelioma, the signature cancer of asbestos, glioblastama often has a complex, interwoven growth pattern with finger-like tentacles that spread out causing the boundaries between malignant tissue and healthy tissue to become blurred. Because of this, surgery, often the first course of treatment, leaves cancerous cells behind leading to continued growth and limited survival.

“Patients desperately need a better Standard of Care,” said Shawn Hingtgen, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Care Center, who led the study, according to a Feb. 24 press release from University of North Carolina.

http://uncnews.unc.edu/2016/02/24/unc-chapel-hill-researchers-make-groundbreaking-discovery-use-skin-cells-to-kill-cancer/

To achieve this, the researchers report that they found a way to take the patient’s own skin cells and turn them into “cancer-hunting stem cells that destroy brain tumors.” In effect, through a Nobel Prize-winning technique from 2007, the researchers reprogrammed the skin cells to become induced neural stem cells.

These stem cells, according to the researchers, “have an innate ability to move throughout the brain and home in on and kill any remaining cancer cells.” The team also showed that these stem cells could be engineered to produce a tumor-killing protein, increasing the likelihood the cancerous cells will be stopped.

“We wanted to find out if these induced neural stem cells would home in on cancer cells and whether they could be used to deliver a therapeutic agent,” said Dr. Hingten. “This is the first time this direct reprogramming technology has been used to treat cancer.”

In a test on mice, the team was able to increase the survival by as much as 220 percent, depending on the type of tumor. In the short term, the team will turn their focus to human stem cells and assessing anti-cancer drugs that can be loaded into the tumor-seeking neural stem cells.

The team is also focusing on “improving the staying power of stem cells within the surgical cavity.” The work will ensure the stem cells have enough life to seek out the cancer cells.

Breakthrough in any cancer research can translate to hope for the nearly 3,000 Americans diagnosed with the deadly cancer each year. The average survival time for mesothelioma patients is less than a year.

The full study can be found in the Feb. 2 journal Nature Communications.

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160524/ncomms11734/full/ncomms11734.html

Mesothelioma Nurse Hopes for Good Things from “Moonshot” Inititative

• Lisa Hyde-Barrett
• Mesothelioma, Nurse's Corner

Recently, during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address he announced the “Moonshot” program, led by Vice- President Joe Biden, to help “cure” cancer. There have been other wars on cancer, but research had yet not evolved to where it is today. President Obama pledged $1 billion to fund the program over two years. We applaud this initiative and hope that the spending is approved swiftly by Congress.

As mesothelioma victims and their families know, research, like clinical trials, takes time and money before the potential promising therapy can be offered to patients. The Food and Drug Administration’s approval process, together with the stages of the clinical trials’ process takes an average of 10 years to bring a new treatment to market.

This 10 year timeline reminds me of a woman from Minnesota who is celebrating 10 years on her journey of living with mesothelioma. She has shared her journey with so many others, supported many caregivers, and has been very open about her thoughts and fears. Some of the attributes that she possesses – her positive attitude, the fight to never give up, faith, unwavering family support – we have seen in other mesothelioma patients who have not survived 10 years. What makes her a survivor?

At this point no-one knows. There are theories, maybe her age, cell type, operation that she had, or timing. Does her continuous giving back to others somehow make a difference? The “moonshot” initiative leaves us with the hope that ten years from now, this same woman will be explaining to a large group of long-term mesothelioma survivors, how she has lived a full, blessed life.

We wish her many more years of good health and happiness!

Know more about Mesothelioma and how you can deal with it.

Initial Research That Shows Combination Therapy “Substantially” Improves Lung Cancer Survival Rates Could Translate to Mesothelioma

• Nancy Meredith
• Featured News

Recent research into the most effective treatments for lung cancer and mesothelioma patients has led researchers to conclude that two drugs are more effective than one. Now, in another study, researchers found the same to be true, and that a combination therapy significantly increased survival rates in certain lung cancer patients who have limited treatment options.

Read about other combination treatments using immunotherapy here and here.
http://www.asbestosdiseaseawareness.org

Researchers from the Experimental Oncology Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) report lung cancer patients expressing the Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog (KRAS) are faced with the most aggressive subtype of lung cancer. Nearly 30% of the 20,000 lung cancer cases in Spain each year are KRAS-positive, but, according to the CNIO team, the standard treatment is cisplatin-based therapy that has proved inadequate.

The researchers set out to understand how tumors evolve, or as they report, “adapt to the environment in order to grow and  survive.” This, they report, is why cancers become resistant to cancer treatments after initially responding.

“Classically, tumours have been studied at advanced stages, but we were interested in studying the initial stages of tumour formation,” says Chiara Ambrogio, first author of the paper, in a Feb. 10 press release announcing the research. “We followed this approach to avoid the heterogeneity issue and try to identify new essential mechanisms that sustain tumour development with potential therapeutic uses,” says Ambrogio.

After nearly five years of research, the team found that the combination of the anti-cancer drugs dasatinib, a DDR1 protein inhibitor, and demcizumab, a Notch pathway inhibitor antibody, worked in concert to “effectively” reduce lung tumors and improve “prognosis and survival rates substantially.”

The researchers concluded that the two drugs were comparable to standard chemotherapy and that it could lead to “an effective targeted therapy for patients with KRAS-mutant lung adenocarcinoma.”

Mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer caused by exposure to airborne asbestos fibers. Mesothelioma is highly aggressive and is resistant to many current treatments. Care often follows the same protocol as lung cancer. Approximately 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year. Currently, there is no known cure for mesothelioma.

The research, conducted on mouse models, will soon move into clinical trials “which will make it possible to transfer the discoveries to cancer patients.”

The study was published in the Feb. 8 issue of Nature Medicine.
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v22/n3/full/nm.4041.html

Sources:

• Experimental Oncology Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre
  https://www.cnio.es/ing/publicaciones/the-cnio-finds-a-potential-therapy-for-the-most-aggressive-type-of-lung-cancer-in-preclinical-models