High intake of dietary fats from red meat and dairy products was associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer, according to a new study published online June 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. This study was undertaken because research relating fat intake to pancreatic cancer was inconclusive. To examine the association, Rachael Z. Stolzenberg-Solomon, Ph.D., of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues analyzed a cohort of over 500,000 people from the National Institutes of Health - AARP Diet and Health Study. Participants completed a food frequency questionnaire in 1995 and 1996 and were followed prospectively for an average of 6 year...

The majority of men who receive one of the standard treatments for localized prostate cancer surgery or radiation therapy have an excellent outcome. But for the small group whose prostate cancer returns, a new study offers insight as to why treatment isnt effective. The study a collaboration between researchers at the Josephine Ford Cancer Center at Henry Ford Hospital and Fox Chase Cancer Center shows that men with a low oxygen supply to their tumor have a higher chance of the prostate cancer returning, as found by increasing prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels following treatment. After several years of research, we were able to show that low levels of oxygen to the tumor are highly related to a patients outcome. Those...

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA -- Antisense Therapeutics Ltd. is pleased to report further positive results from its collaborative preclinical research studies on the therapeutic potential of ATL1101 in prostate cancer. In experimental models, ATL1101 treatment significantly enhanced the tumor-suppressive effect of the cancer drug Paclitaxel. Paclitaxel is one of a class of drugs known as taxanes. Along with androgen (a male hormone) blockade, taxane chemotherapy is an important treatment option in the most dangerous form of the disease, castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Illustrating the positive effects of the drug in this mouse model of prostate cancer, prostate tumor volume was halved after 5 weeks of Paclitaxel/ATL...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Two Mayo Clinic patients whose prostate cancer had been considered inoperable are now cancer free thanks in part to an experimental drug therapy that was used in combination with standardized hormone treatment and radiation therapy. The men were participating in a clinical trial of an immunotherapeutic agent called MDX-010 or ipilimumab. In these two cases, physicians say the approach initiated the death of a majority of cancer cells and caused the tumors to shrink dramatically, allowing surgery. In both cases, the aggressive tumors had grown well beyond the prostate into the abdominal areas. The goal of the study was to see if we could modestly improve upon current treatments for advanced prostate cancer, says Euge...

A long-term study by researchers at UCLAs Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center found that the three most common treatments for localized prostate cancer had significant impacts on patients quality of life, a finding that could help guide doctors and patients in making treatment decisions. The four-year study, which followed 475 men treated for early stage prostate cancer, also resulted in the development of probability plots, gauges which can be used to predict when treatment side effects such as urinary incontinence, sexual dysfunction or bowel problems might return to normal, or whether the patient will ever fully recover. Such predictions could be used to determine whether further treatments or surgeries are needed to deal with adv...

MECHELEN, BELGIUM -- Galapagos NV announced that today it has initiated Phase I clinical development of its integrin receptor antagonist (IRA), GLPG0187. This is the second small molecule therapeutic from Galapagos internal drug discovery program to enter the clinic in 2009. Candidate drug GLPG0187 could offer a promising new therapeutic approach for treating cancer patients. Initial development will focus on bone metastases from prostate and breast cancer. Strong anti-cancer therapeutic profile in pre-clinical models GLPG0187 offers a potentially highly competitive therapeutic profile compared to currently available agents to treat bone metastasis, a severe aspect of many cancers. GLPG0187 blocks five integrin receptor...

PHILADELPHIA -- Low-fat diet helps genetically predisposed animals avoid liver cancer, U.S. researchers found. In a study comparing two strains of mice -- one susceptible to developing cancer and the other not -- researchers found that a high-fat diet predisposed the cancer-susceptible strain to liver cancer. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University found that by switching to a low-fat diet early in the experiment, the same high-risk mice avoided the cancer malignancy. The switched mice were lean rather than obese and had healthy livers at the end of the study. The investigators studied hepatocellular carcinoma, a type of liver cancer that is one of the le...

The status of the axillary lymph nodes, the most common sites of breast cancer metastases, is the most important factor in determining the prognosis of patients with invasive breast cancer.1,2 The goals of axillary lymph node dissection are to provide accurate staging information and local control of the disease.3,4 However, the procedure has many potential complications, including lymphedema, persistent seroma, shoulder dysfunction, and paresthesias. Fewer breast cancer patients have presented with axillary lymph node involvement during the past 2 decades because of the increased use of breast cancer screening programs and detection of the disease at an earlier stage. Lymphatic mapping with sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy for breast...

ORLANDO, Fla.--A new blood test used in combination with a conventional prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening sharply increases the accuracy of prostate cancer diagnosis, and could eliminate tens of thousands of unneeded, painful, and costly prostate biopsies annually, according to a study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. At the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Orlando, Fla., William K. Oh, M.D., and Robert W. Ross, M.D., will report that the six-gene molecular diagnostic test, when combined with a PSA test, accurately detected prostate cancer more than 90 percent of the time. Earlier studies suggest that the conventional PSA test is 60-70 percent accurate in detecting cancer. The f...

Access Pharmaceuticals, Inc., provided an update today on the progress in the Companys clinical development plan for ProLindac, a novel DACH platinum drug that has shown to be active in many solid tumor types in human clinical studies. Access recently announced positive safety and efficacy results from its Phase 2 monotherapy clinical study of ProLindac(TM) in late-stage, heavily pretreated ovarian cancer patients. In this study, 66% of patients who received the highest dose achieved clinically meaningful disease stabilization according to RECIST criteria. No patient in any dose group exhibited any signs of acute neurotoxicity, which is a major adverse side-effect of the approved DACH platinum, Eloxatin, and ProLindac was well tolerated ov...