The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded the approved use of the drug ado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla) to treat some women with HER2-positive breast cancer. Ado-trastuzumab, also called T-DM1, was initially approved by FDA more than 6 years ago to treat women with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer. Under the expanded approval, it can now be used when the cancer is far less advanced: as a post-surgical, or adjuvant, treatment in women with early-stage HER2-positive breast cancer. However, to be eligible to receive the drug under this newly approved use, women must first have undergone presurgical, or neoadjuvant, therapy to shrink their tumors and still have some signs…
Author: Brett Johnson
The potential benefits of vaccines are twofold: In addition to directly protecting those who get the vaccine, they also protect those who don’t. The latter, a phenomenon called herd immunity, occurs as more and more people get vaccinated, further restricting the ease with which the disease-causing germ can spread. Now a new study suggests that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may be providing men with herd immunity against HPV infections of the throat. Oral HPV infections cause over 70% of all oropharyngeal cancers in the United States, and rates of these cancers in men have skyrocketed over the past several decades. Between 2009 and 2016,…
Avelas Biosciences, a California-based clinical-stage oncology company, is developing AVB-620, a novel drug-device combination product for use during cancer surgery. AVB-620 works to improve surgery by detecting cancer in real-time and has the potential to become part of standard-of-care treatment for many different cancer surgeries. AVB-620 has been developed from technology that originates in the lab of Nobel Laureate Roger Y. Tsien at the University of California – San Diego. It is currently in a registration trial for detecting positive margins during breast cancer surgery. According to the company’s website, the initial motivation behind the invention was to enable systemic…
Chaos can be surprisingly orderly. While cancer is characterized by uncontrolled cell growth, that growth is, nevertheless, the result of a very particular cascade of events, from carcinogen exposure to genetic mutations. Interfere with that cascade, and cancer can be ground to a halt, or even killed off. The efforts of longtime NFCR-supported research luminary, Harold Dvorak, M.D., help reveal this—specifically, his work with a particular protein. “It’s a growth factor made by tumor cells but also has a very important role in wound healing,” Dr. Dvorak explains, speaking of the protein. “And, in fact, what tumors do by making VEGF…
Despite all of the advancements in cancer research and cures, there is one major aspect of the disease that is as under-discussed as it is controversial: patient cost. While the road to recovery is anything but easy, the road to post-cancer financial wellness is a hotly-contested and complex issue that both doctors and politicians are reluctant to address—yet it can leave patients in a desperate situation. A recent study of young adult cancer patients by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, in collaboration with academic medical centers throughout the U.S., brings the issue into sharp focus. This study,…
MiraDx, a Los Angeles-based company, is committed to discovering meaningful ways to better treat cancer in patients with mutations like and including the KRAS-variant. They are developing answers by applying their novel class of functional, germ-line genetic markers in both radiogenomics and cancer systemic therapy. Radiation therapy is a form of cancer treatment that is used in over 75% of cancer patients diagnosed every year. While radiation is generally a safe treatment, 5-10% of patients will experience serious side effects from treatment. Additionally, the company reports, some patients respond not only locally to radiation, but also have an immune response…
“HER2 is a gene that codes for a protein sitting on the cell surface and sending signals for the cell to grow and divide,” explains Dr. Daniel Haber, Director at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Professor of Oncology at Harvard Medical School, about one of the biggest genetic discoveries in breast cancer treatment in recent years. “It has normal functions, but some cancers make use of HER2 to give themselves extra growth signals,” he continues. “In particular, there is a subset of breast cancer, around 10 percent, that have multiple copies of the gene; instead of the normal two gene…
For many children with advanced forms of neuroblastoma, receiving two separate stem cell transplants as part of their treatment is more beneficial than receiving one. That’s according to the results of an NCI-supported clinical trial conducted by the Children’s Oncology Group (COG). Children in the trial had high-risk neuroblastoma, meaning that their tumors had features that make the cancer particularly aggressive and difficult to treat. Children who received two transplants separated by several weeks lived substantially longer without their cancer progressing or developing any other cancer-related problems, an outcome known as event-free survival, than children who underwent a single transplant, reported Julie Park, M.D., of…