Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Joining forces against cancer

“We are at a crucial moment in our fight against cancer,” said ESMO President Prof. Jose Baselga. “We have never before made so much progress in our fight to eradicate cancer as a cause of death, and multidisciplinary treatment is a key factor in this success.”

New data presented at the 33rd ESMO Congress, 12-16 September 2008, Stockholm, Sweden also highlight the benefits of combined treatments:

Phase II trial of pazopanib before surgery in early lung cancer

Pazopanib, a new oral angiogenesis inhibitor, has demonstrated interesting activity in difficult to treat non-small-cell lung cancer, US researchers report. In a phase II trial, 30 out of 35 patients treated with preoperative pazopanib for a minimum of two weeks saw their tumor size shrink by up to 85%.

“This is a positive result that will be explored further,” said Prof. Nasser Altorki from Weil Medical College of Cornell University in New York. “To my knowledge, no other results on the effect of angiogenesis inhibitors in early stage operable lung cancer have been published. The results presented here with pazopanib indicate a highly active drug in this setting and further development in lung cancer is underway to fully understand the value of this drug in this disease.”

Chemotherapy, radiotherapy and cetuximab in head and neck cancer

Treating locally advanced head and neck cancers with an alternating regimen of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, plus cetuximab, has shown promise in a phase II trial, Italian researchers report.

Their trial in 45 patients combined chemotherapy with fluorouracil and carboplatin given on weeks 1, 4 and 7 of treatment, with radiotherapy administered daily on weeks 2-3, 5-6 and 8-10. Cetuximab was also added weekly. “Both complete response rate and long-term results compare favorably with the best reported in the literature,” Dr. Marco Merlano from the S. Croce General Hospital in Cuneo reports. 30 patients experienced a skin toxicity that the authors attribute to an interaction between the treatments, and 2 patients died from toxicities, they report.

Zoledronic acid added to adjuvant endocrine therapy prevents breast cancer recurrences

One-third of breast cancer recurrences in pre-menopausal women can be prevented by adding zoldronic acid to treatment with endocrine therapy combined with anastrazole or tamoxifen.

These results, reported for the first time recently, show that “we can positively impact the fate of our cancer patients by influencing the microenvironment of micro-metastases by relatively simple means,” says lead author Prof. Michael Gnant from the Medical University of Vienna.

The study results are included in the ESMO "Oncology Highlights" session in Stockholm. The findings will be expanded with new data from a multivariate analysis of the variables affecting disease-free and recurrence-free survival, Professor Gnant said.

Vanessa Pavinato | alfa
Further information:
http://www.esmo.org

Im Focus: Manipulating Electron Spins Without Loss of Information

Physicists have developed a new technique that uses electrical voltages to control the electron spin on a chip. The newly-developed method provides protection from spin decay, meaning that the contained information can be maintained and transmitted over comparatively large distances, as has been demonstrated by a team from the University of Basel’s Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute. The results have been published in Physical Review X.

For several years, researchers have been trying to use the spin of an electron to store and transmit information. The spin of each electron is always coupled...

Im Focus: The proton precisely weighted

What is the mass of a proton? Scientists from Germany and Japan successfully did an important step towards the most exact knowledge of this fundamental constant. By means of precision measurements on a single proton, they could improve the precision by a factor of three and also correct the existing value.

To determine the mass of a single proton still more accurate – a group of physicists led by Klaus Blaum and Sven Sturm of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear...

Im Focus: On the way to a biological alternative

A bacterial enzyme enables reactions that open up alternatives to key industrial chemical processes

The research team of Prof. Dr. Oliver Einsle at the University of Freiburg's Institute of Biochemistry has long been exploring the functioning of nitrogenase....

Im Focus: The 1 trillion tonne iceberg

Larsen C Ice Shelf rift finally breaks through

A one trillion tonne iceberg - one of the biggest ever recorded -- has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica, after a rift in the ice,...

Im Focus: Laser-cooled ions contribute to better understanding of friction

Physics supports biology: Researchers from PTB have developed a model system to investigate friction phenomena with atomic precision

Friction: what you want from car brakes, otherwise rather a nuisance. In any case, it is useful to know as precisely as possible how friction phenomena arise –...