AboutMesothelioma.Net

Cvax Magazine: Cancer Vaccines

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Source: CVax Magazine: Cancer Vaccines

CVax Magazine: Cancer Vaccines is a website dedicated to educating the public on the use of vaccines in the treatment of cancer. Vaccine-based cancer treatment will take one of two forms: the develpoment of a vaccine to prevent the development of cancer, such as Gardisil, which protects against most causes of cervical cancer, and the development of a vaccine to treat patients who’ve previously developed a cancer. This modality will be used much more often than a fully preventative one.

CVax magazine discusses both of these treatment options in details and provides all of the background needed to understand the use of vaccines for cancer treatment.

Labels: mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 10:33 AM
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Study to Determine Asbestos Exposure Impact on Women

Source: ABC SouthWest

Researches from the University of Western Australia are beginning a study that will examine the impact of asbestos exposure on women. This is the first study to focus exclusively on women and could illuminate previously unknown patterns of malignancy, such as the relationship between ovarian cancer and asbestos exposure.

Labels: asbestos

posted by Belluck & Fox at 9:41 AM
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Asbestos Board in Question

Friday, May 25, 2007

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is convening a review board that will draft a risk assessment for asbestos fibers and certain environmental groups have protested the inclusion of certain individuals on the EPA’s “short list” of those who may be invited to the panel. Some of the people on the list have financial ties to industry groups or individual organizations that could be affected by the conclusions that the board may come up with, so these environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, have lodged formal complaints about these candidates. The groups feel that no panel member should have a financial stake in a group or business whose product may fall under the domain of the panel’s research. However, a member of the EPA’s science advisory board has said that the board will not have a policy or regulatory role and its conclusions will only be used as advice in the development of any regulation.

Labels: asbestos

posted by Belluck & Fox at 3:31 PM
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Coaxing Cancer Researchers To Take Your Money

Source: Wall Street Journal

Raising money for research has always been a fundamental problem in the development of new treatments for any medical condition, whether cancer or AIDS or anything else. With budgets tight and staffing often thin, many researchers scramble to find whatever funding they can. However, this is not the only problem in the development of new treatments.

What does one do if money is available, but no one wants it?

This is exactly the problem that Jeffrey and Marnie Kaufman ran into in 2004 when Marnie was diagnosed with the rare cancer adenoid cystic carcinoma. After her diagnosis, she and her husband met with David Sidranksy, director of head-and-neck-cancer research at John Hopkins University, and he explained to them that many researchers are fearful of starting work rare cancers becuase they may lose funding support in the future. With budgets tight at the publicly-funded cancer centers and grant-giving organizations, certain research just isn’t getting done.

With this in mind, the Kaufmans decided to try to and sponsor the research themselves. They quickly raised $700,000 and then hired a panel of experts who worked with them in developing project types they wanted to complete, after which, the Kaufmans themselves went out and hired the reserachers they wanted to work with. Because they were spearheading the project themselves, the process took noticeably quicker to begin – Jeffrey and Marnie contacted the researches, organized the teleconferences and established the scope and guidelines in a fraction of the time that it normally takes to begin a cancer research project.

The Kaufmans are not the only ones who are taking medical research into their own hands. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is doing something very similar. Instead of allocating most of its research funds into projects and ideas that began with other groups or organizations or individuals, they – like the Kaufmans – are identifying the research they want completed and approaching pharmaceutical companies and other organizations to do it.

Labels: mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 3:02 PM
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Cancer Care Seeks to Take Patients Beyond Survival

Source: New York Times.

The development of increasingly successful cancer treatments ranks among the most important of the great medical breakthroughs over the last five or ten years. As more and more patients are surviving cancer though, many of these people are also suffering from the significant side effects of these life-saving treatments – side effects that weren’t noticed or were simply ignored in previous generations of cancer treatment when saving a patient’s life was the only goal in mind. Now that there are over ten million cancer survivors in America, up from the three million in the 1970s, doctors are beginning to treat cancer as any other long-term chronic disease where the actual medical treatment is only one part of a patient’s future prognosis. As quality of life issues have become more important aspects of a patient’s life, a new medical specialty, known as survivorship, has emerged. The Lance Armstrong Foundation, named after the American cyclist who has successfully battled multiple forms of cancer in his life, is financing many of these life after cancer programs at major hospitals around the country.

Mary S. McCabe, director of the survivorship program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, says, “It’s no longer sufficient to say, ‘Well, you survived’…We need to maximize their recovery and quality of life.”

Labels: mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 2:22 PM
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ONCONASE has Potential as Chemopreventive Agent in Mesothelioma

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Source: Alfacell Corporation

Dr. Michele Carbone, one of the world’s leading mesothelioma researchers, has discovered that Alfacell Corporation’s ONCONASE has great potential as a chemopreventative agent for mesothelioma. ONCONASE triggers apoptosis, the natural death of cells, in cancer cells and has been shown to block the pathway that causes asbestos carcinogenesis. Dr. Carbone’s initial research has shown that ONCONASE may be used as a chemopreventative agent for people who are at-risk for developing mesothelioma or it could be used to reduce the doses of cytotoxic agents in those who’ve already developed the disease. Dr. Carbone hopes to start clinical trials on this topic soon.

“The potential of ONCONASE as an early first-line preventative treatment for mesothelioma is an exciting development that we plan to investigate through clinical trials,” said Dr. Carbone. “With approximately more than 25 million asbestos exposure cases reported worldwide, we believe that ONCONASE might play a greater role in the treatment protocols for a much larger population than was originally envisioned for this dismal disease.”

Labels: asbestos, mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 11:31 AM
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Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization Releases New Findings on Exposed Victims

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Source: InsuranceNewsNet

The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) has released its latest report on the patient profile of asbestos victims. Contrary to what many people’s view are on asbestos exposure, ADAO reported that the average victim is aged 50, which is younger than what has been previously been reported, is a woman, also contrary to the expectation of men as the primary victim class, and, perhaps most disconcerting, that nearly forty percent had exposure that was environmentally-based and not work-related. Dr. Robert Taub, Milstein Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Columbia University Mesothelioma Center in New York City, reported that the average age of peritoneal mesothelioma patients at his clinic is 51.7 and that less than fifty percent had immediately recognizable asbestos exposure.

These results from ADAO show that the patient profile for asbestos-related disease is changing. They note that in 1986 the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported that the median age was nearly 70 and another study estimated that eighty percent of patients were men. According to ADAO, studies estimate that as many as 100,000 victims in the United States alone will die of an asbestos-related disease over the next ten years.

Labels: asbestos, mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 3:49 PM
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Pleural Mesothelioma and Surgery

Friday, May 4, 2007

Source: CancerMonthly.com

In an interview with CancerMonthly.com, Dr. David Sugarbaker, a thoracic surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, stated that the goal of every surgery for pleural mesothelioma should be a macroscopic complete resection (MCR), where all tumor tissue visible to the human eye is removed. According to Dr. Sugarbaker, if all of the visible tumor tissue can be removed, post-surgical drug treatment will have less tumor cells to eradicate, which should increase the likelihood of longer survival times.

Because mesothelioma can attack the pleural areas in multiple ways, different surgical techniques will be required for different malignancy types. If the tumors are limited to the surface of the lung then a pleurectomy, which is the surgical removal of tumors confined to the surface of the lung, can often achieve MCR. For those patients with a more invasive malignancy, where tumors have grown into the fissures of the lungs and other areas, an extrapleural pneumonectomy, where the affected lung, the covering of the heart, and the diaphragm are removed, may be required.

In all cases, Dr. Sugarbaker maintained, the needs of the mesothelioma patient — and not the services offered by the surgeon — should dictate the surgical methods utilized.

Labels: mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 4:55 PM
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WHO Calls for Prevention of Cancer Through Healthy Workplaces

Source: World Health Organization

The World Health Organization is calling on governments to enact meaningful reform to workplace safety laws and to increase the measures used to protect workers from work-related injury or death. At least 200,000 people die every year from work-caused cancers and millions more are regularly exposed to carcinogenic agents that can dramatically shorten their life expectancy. Mesothelioma, lung cancer and leukemia are just three examples of work-related cancers that can be prevented with the passage and enforcement of meaningful reform.

Specific WHO recommendations include:

• Stop the use of asbestos;
• Introduce benzene-free organic solvents and technologies that convert the carcinogenic chromium into a non-carcinogenic form;
• Ban tobacco use at the workplace; and
• Provide protective clothes for people working in the sun.

The majority of workplace-related deaths currently occur in the developed world, but developing nations represent a new horizon of workplace health epidemics. The WHO’s policy recommendations are made to governments in both the developed and the developing world in order to protect workers everywhere.

Labels: asbestos, LungCancer, mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 4:31 PM
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Mesothelioma and Molecular Pathways

Source: CancerMonthly.Com

Research into the treatment of mesothelioma is taking place on many fronts. While the typical treatment regimen is still a combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, new avenues of therapy are being researched and many hold great promise for the future. Some of these cutting-edge therapies target the molecular pathways by which the disease grows and spreads itself throughout the body. Therapies based on anti-angiogenesis drugs target the signaling pathways involved with the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) protein or the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) protein and attempt to disrupt the processes by which tumors develop. Other signaling pathways being studied for the treatment of mesothelioma include the Wnt pathway, which is thought to play an important role in activating mesothelioma stem cells, as well as the P53, pRB, BCL-2 pathways. Along with the development of targeted anti-cancer agents, work in genomics also promises to revolutionize cancer treatment. By looking at how the body works at its most basic level, scientists hope to develop therapies based on the interaction of drug agents with an individual’s genetics.

Labels: mesothelioma

posted by Belluck & Fox at 4:24 PM
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