An expert panel from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has conclusively determined that asbestos causes cancer of the larynx. The IOM report aggregated findings from 34 different studies and concluded that people who are exposed to asbestos have a forty percent greater chance of developing cancer of the larynx than do people without a previous asbestos exposure. For those trades with regular, heavy asbestos exposure, such as miners and certain construction workers, their risk of exposure was double to triple that of normal. Cancer of the larynx now joins lung cancer and mesothelioma as definite products of asbestos exposure.

The IOM report has also implicated asbestos as a possible cause of cancers of the stomach, upper throat, colon, and rectum. However, the data was not strong enough to conclusively determine that asbestos was the primary causative agent in those malignancies.

The IOM report comes in the middle of a congressional debate on setting up a $140 billion fund to settle new and outstanding asbestos-related health claims. The bill is unlikely to be passed in this legislative session as a great divide over many of the bill’s particulars still separates many Democrats and Republicans.

Alfacell has announced more pre-clinical successes for ONCOCASE, it’s leading drug candidate. The latest results, published in the journal Cancer Letters, show that ONCONASE “inhibits neuroblastoma cell growth and induces caspase-independent cell death in neuroblastoma cells independently of P-gp expression or p53 status….” Neuroblastoma is a cancer that forms in the nerve tissue. It is the most common type of cancer in infants and the fourth most common type to affect children in general.

The success of these tests follow shortly after Alfacell’s announcement in May that ONCOCASE shows promise as a chemopreventive agent for the treatment of mesothelioma. In that announcement, Alfacell noted that Dr. Michele Carbone, one of the world’s leading mesothelioma researchers, discovered that ONCONASE triggers apoptosis in mesothelioma cells and that it blocks the molecular pathway that causes asbestos carcinogenesis.

These latest results show even greater promise for the use of ONCONASE as a cancer-fighting agent.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO) has released a report criticizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s asbestos-response to the tragic events of Septemper 11th. The GAO report says that the EPA “mis-led” the public regarding the presence of asbestos in apartments near the former World Trade Center. The EPA said that only a “very small” number of apartments had unsafe levels of asbestos – however, they only tested this after the professional company they hired had completed cleanup. The GAO also criticized the EPA for giving an “all-clear” to workers to return to the area before the necessary testing could be completed.

Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco’s Comprehensive Cancer Center have recently identified a gene that is significantly overexpressed in mesothelioma malignancies. The gene, known as stathmin, has previously been implicated in other forms of cancer that show a similar aggressiveness and chemoresistancy to mesothelioma. Stathmin is important to the regulation of a cell’s architecture: it instructs the cell when to grow, to divide, to develop and to reproduce. Understanding how to control stathmin expression is currently an important part of many different research projects into cancer treatment. By learning more about the role that stathmin plays in the development of malignant mesothelioma, researchers hope to develop novel therapies for the treatment of mesothelioma.

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

Opening Statement of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer
Chairman, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works
EPW Hearing on the Health Effects of Asbestos
Remarks as prepared for delivery
June 12, 2007

This is an important hearing for millions of Americans who have been exposed to asbestos, for their families, and especially for the thousands of American families who have lost family members to asbestos-related lung disease and cancer. Millions of Americans are still being exposed to asbestos today, and if we don’t act, countless more people will get sick and die in the future.

I want to thank Senator Murray, who has taken a leadership role on this issue. Her legislation, the Ban Asbestos in America Act of 2007, would place the United States clearly on the side of protecting the health of the public from this dangerous substance. It would ban nearly all uses of asbestos in products. I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this bill.

We must take every reasonable step we can to end exposures to asbestos. When we see our fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers dying from asbestos, there is no justification for allowing the number of dead to continue to mount. We know enough about asbestos to act today.

Asbestos fibers can be 1,200 times smaller than a human hair. These microscopic fibers can stay invisible and suspended in the air for days. People, including children, can breathe these fibers deep into their lungs, where they cause their damage.

We see the result of this in communities across our country. This nationwide actually – worldwide — tragedy has hit my State of California especially hard.

According to National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, between 1993 and 2002, more than a 1,000 people died from asbestosis caused by exposures at their work. From 1999 to 2002, NIOSH reports, 1,001 people died from mesothelioma, a rare cancer and deadly cancer generally caused by asbestos. These figures do not include the deaths from lung cancer and other diseases that asbestos can cause, or the deaths that the government tracking system may have missed.

The deaths of hard-working people exposed to asbestos at their work only tell part of the story. Workers can take asbestos into their homes on their clothes. After a hard day at work, they go home and hug their children or sit with their families at the dinner table. Their spouses may handle their asbestos-laden clothes. Nobody can see the fibers, but they can still kill.

Margarito Martinez lived in Baldwin Park, California with his wife of 39 years, Rebecca, pictured here on the right. Margarito worked as a plasterer and Rebecca would clean his asbestos-covered clothes when he came home, breathing in the dust as she shook them out and did the laundry. They say they were never warned about the dangers of asbestos. Rebecca was diagnosed with the deadly cancer mesothelioma in 2002. She died four months later.

Georgina Bryson lived in Riverside, California when she died of mesothelioma. From 1962 until 1980, Georgina lived downwind from two cement companies that used asbestos to manufacture their products. Georgina was also exposed to asbestos when she lived with her father, who worked with gaskets that contained asbestos. Georgina was only 40 years old when she died from mesothelioma.

Here is a picture of a lung damaged by mesothelioma, just one of a number of devastating diseases caused by asbestos.

Despite all of this death, we continue to allow the importation and use of asbestos and products that contain asbestos. World production of asbestos actually increased in 2005, from 2.36 million metric tons in 2004, to 2.40 million metric tons in 2005.

In the United States, we imported 2,530 metric tons of asbestos, and we imported more than 90,000 metric tons of products that may contain asbestos. Products like cement and gaskets, as well as brakes and clutch parts for automobiles. Even the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that people who work on cars should be careful because of the danger of breathing in asbestos.

The good news is that there are safer alternatives to asbestos that are available today. Because of this and the continuing risks to people’s health, many nations have adopted asbestos bans.

Due to the on-going dangers of using asbestos, the World Health Organization reports that more than 40 countries have banned or are phasing out the use of asbestos.

I believe the United States should squarely address the asbestos problem. That is why I am a strong supporter of Senator Murray’s bill, S. 742, the Ban Asbestos in America Act of 2007, which would accomplish this goal here in the United States.

In scores of nations, products that used to be made with asbestos now are being made without it. I have great faith in American ingenuity, and strongly believe that these products can be made here from safer materials as well.

This hearing’s focus is clear. It is on people, and the terrible price they continue to pay because asbestos is being used, despite the availability of safer alternatives.

Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat from Wisconsin, hopes to finally see her act to ban asbestos become law this year. The “Ban Asbestos in American Act of 2007″ was the focus of a hearing that took place on June 12 in the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. Murray first introduced a bill to ban asbestos in 2002, but the bill has never come up for a vote. With the Democrats in control of the Senate after the mid-term elections, Sen. Murray and her supporters are hopeful that the bill will finally become law.

The “Ban Asbestos in America Act of 2007″ calls for a complete ban of asbestos in products within two years after the measure become law. In a concession to Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson and some other Republicans, the bill would give the chlorine industry three years to phase out asbestos after new regulations are written by the Environmental Protection Agency. It allocates $50 million in research funds to study the causes and treatment of asbestos-related cancers and will require the federal government to begin an information campaign to educate the public about the risks of asbestos.

During the hearing, Murray asked the committee,

…to anyone who says we don’t need this bill, I would just pose one question: How many more Americans have to die before our government finally does the right thing and bans asbestos?

A recent Phase III study conducted by the Norwegian Lung Cancer Group has shown that a combination of ALIMTA plus carboplatin has enhanced quality-of-life benefits over the traditional therapies used for advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The randomized, multicenter study enrolled 446 chemonaive patients with either Stage III-B or Stage IV NSCLC and compared quality-of-life results for the ALIMTA plus carboplatin control group vs. the GEMZAR plus carboplatin control group. The results so far released have shown that the ALIMTA control group had a more favorable toxicity profile than the GEMZAR control group.

In another trial studying the therapeutic effects of ALIMTA, the International Oncology Network Study is evaluating the safety of Avastin when added to the combination of ALIMTA plus oxaliplatin in patients with advanced NSCLC. Previous studies have shown that both ALIMTA and oxaliplatin cause activity with NSCLC and that ALIMTA has shown synergistic effects when combined with other platinum-based drugs. The endpoint of this early-stage study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the combination as first-line treatment for NSCLC.

ALIMTA in combination with cisplatin is also a treatment regiment for patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma whose disease is unresectable or who are otherwise not candidates for curative surgery.

Once again, a study has demonstrated that the combination of pemetrexed with either cisplatin or carboplatin has demonstrated activity in previously untreated malignant pleural mesothelioma. The pemetrexed-cisplatin group led to an overall response rate of 26.3% in 745 mesothelioma patients, and the combination of pemetrexed and carboplatin was associated with an overall response rate of 21.6%. The differences in the response rates are not considered statistically-significant. One-year survival was 63 to 64% and the median time to progression was about seven months with both regimens.

These results come from an analysis of 1,704 chemotherapy-naïve malignant pleural mesothelioma patients, including 1,497 patients with response data. They were among more than 3,000 mesothelioma patients worldwide who received pemetrexed alone or in combination with a platinum agent.

The results were reported at a medical conference and as a published abstract and should be considered preliminary until they appear in a peer-reviewed journal.