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April 16, 2008

AACR: Kiss, Kiss

In cancer, it’s typically not the primary tumour that kills – it’s the metastases. Little wonder, then, that a major topic at the meeting was developing drugs not to shrink the primary tumour, but to stop it from spreading.

Danny Welch from the University of Alabama at Birmingham presented data on an interesting protein called KISS1. (Welch claims the protein is so named because he lived near Hershey, Pennsylvania at the time of its discovery. For you international readers, Hershey, Pennsylvania is the home of Hershey’s, the chocolate company that makes ‘Hershey’s kisses”.)

Anyway, KISS1 inhibits metastasis, but the fascinating thing is that it does so without preventing the spread of tumour cells. Instead, it keeps the metastasized cells from flourishing in their new environment. In other words, if you inject KISS1-expressing tumour cells into mice, they’ll form a primary tumour and cells from the primary tumour will migrate to the lungs. And then they’ll just sit there, lost and lonely.

Continue reading "AACR: Kiss, Kiss" »

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:27 PM |

AACR: Seeds, soils, and rapid autopsies

In 1889 Stephen Paget came up with the ‘seed to soil’ theory to explain why some cancers seem to spread to specific organs, rather than just invading the body at random. He said that perhaps there were features of the soil (the organ) that determined whether the seed (the cancer) took root there. Some soils simply aren’t hospitable to some seeds (having gardened in the heavy red clay of North Carolina, I can attest to that…)

Quite a few speakers evoked the seed to soil theory in talks about metastasis. One such speaker, Sara Sukumar of Johns Hopkins University, mentioned it while talking about her rapid autopsy program. The program is meant to test the assumption that the characteristics of the original ‘primary’ tumour will be shared by its metastatic offspring. There is some evidence to support this: gene expression patterns in some breast cancer tumours have been shown to resemble gene expression in their distant metastases, for example. But Sukumar says our understanding of this relationship is hindered by a lack of tissue to study because researchers often have only a single biopsy from each patient.

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Posted by Heidi Ledford at 07:32 PM |

April 15, 2008

AACR: Funding realities at the US National Cancer Institute

NCI director John Niederhuber was around today to answer questions from conference attendees. First, though, he gave everyone the hard truth about the budget.

The data:
Number of years that funding for NCI has remained flat: 4
Rate of biomedical research inflation (apparently slightly higher than the overall rate of inflation in the United States): 3.8% per year
Percent decrease in purchasing power at the NCI since 2004: 15%

Niederhuber said that for the first few years of flat funding, NCI tried to cope with its shrinking budget by trimming the size of their grants rather than decreasing the number of awards. Those days are over, he said today, and this year NCI will offer fewer of their competing research project grants. Niederhuber also said that he was not optimistic about the possibility of any future budget increases, "no matter which party takes over the White House".

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 10:09 AM |

AACR: The return of cox-2 inhibitors

Today's plenary session on 'late-breaking clinical trials' offered up a few new promising phase III trial results for the prevention of colorectal cancer.

The first was an update on a kind of cox-2 inhibitor called celecoxib (marketed as Celebrex). You may remember the cox-2 inhibitors -- they're a class of anti-inflammatory drugs that were the center of a scandal a few years ago when it turned out they carried increased risk of cardiovascular side effects, such as heart attacks or stroke. Most of the scandal (and accusations of suppressed negative data) revolved around rofecoxib, better known as "Vioxx", which was subsequently pulled from the market. Celecoxib is still available but carries the dreaded black-boxwarning. (The black box is the FDA's strongest warning, and is the last stop before yanking a drug off the market entirely.)

But celecoxib had shown promise for preventing colorectal cancer in those at high risk for the disease, and I've heard it said on several occasions that the negative press about the drugs' possible cardiovascular harm unfairly restricted use of what could have been a valuable cancer preventative. Today, Monica Bertagnolli of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston reported that the protective effects of celecoxib have persisted in patients that stopped taking the drug 1.5 years ago, when the study was halted due to the realization that celecoxib posed a cardiovascular risk.

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Posted by Heidi Ledford at 10:05 AM |

April 14, 2008

AACR: A few cancer meeting statistics

Number of attendees: ~17,000
(Population of the town that I grew up in: ~20,000)

Pages in the program book: 590

Number of sessions I attended today in which a cell phone rang during a presentation: 5

Number of sessions I attended today in which a cell phone rang, and the owner answered it and started talking during a presentation: 2

Number of sessions I attended today in which someone in the audience pulled out his cell phone, dialed, and started talking during a presentation: 1

Number of photos or recordings attendees are allowed to take of a presentation without explicit permission: 0

Number of people discreetly recording videos of Jeremy Rich's (Duke University) talk this afternoon, after he had explicitly asked the audience not to: at least 2

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 09:08 AM |

AACR: A few cancer statistics

A few semi-random stats culled from my notes.

Approximate age of the 'cancer stem cell' hypothesis: 150 years

Amount of money spent in the United States for cancer treatment in 2004: $72 billion

Number of candidate cancer biomarkers reported in the literature: at least 1261

Number of biomarkers approved each year by the US FDA since 1998: less than 1 per year

Percent increase in the risk of one kind of breast cancer in postmenopausal women who drink 3 or more glasses of alcohol each day: 51%
(that's estrogen- and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, for those of you keeping score)

Number of women in the alcohol-and-breast-cancer study: 184,418

Percent decrease in the risk of colorectal cancer in mouse pups whose mothers were fed a diet rich in folic acid during pregnancy and lactation: 300%

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 09:02 AM |

AACR: Play that funky music

I have just seen some of the world's greatest minds dancing to "Play that funky music, white boy".

What's that? You want pictures and videos? The thought definitely crossed my mind, but they looked so happy out there on the dance floor at the AACR reception -- I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Plus, I'm not sure what the legal ramifications of that would be. Could we be sued for posting an unflattering video of cancer researchers getting funky? Best not to take any chances.

In any case, I had some trouble accessing the internet from the conference today, so I'll try to catch up on a little blogging before calling it a night.

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 08:42 AM |

April 13, 2008

AACR: (Too) sunny San Diego

Greetings from San Diego -- or, as I've come to think of it, 'the surface of the sun'. Normally I’d spend this introductory, ‘scene-setting’ blog entry whining about how I’d rather be out playing in the Pacific. Not today. It was absurdly, oppressively, unjustly sunny outside. The sun streamed into the windows of the convention center, and attendees squinted and winced down the hallway. Some sat out on the patio, stretched out with their feet up on chairs sunbathing, but I don’t know how they did it. One trip out of the convention center for lunch left me sunburned and sapped. A darkened conference room offered sanctuary, but the doorway opened into one of those sun-drenched hallways. From inside the room, the hallway was nothing more than a blaze of white light.

Overall, today was a slow day, filled with educational sessions that were informative but not so newsy. Tomorrow the meeting kicks off in earnest at 7am…

Posted by Heidi Ledford at 01:27 AM |

April 18, 2007

AACR: Calories in, calories out

So, remember how fat is one of the few factors consistently linked to cancer? Researchers are hard at work trying to figure out why, and here’s what they’re learning, according to a symposium on the obesity-cancer link:

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Posted by Erika Check at 05:47 PM |

April 17, 2007

AACR: Cancer from flour?

Well, hopefully not. But today, I learned that some researchers question the wisdom of adding a nutrient called folic acid to flour, as we do in the United States. Folic acid is a form of vitamin B that is essential for preventing very serious birth defects. It's also suspected to prevent colon cancer. But confusingly, some researchers also seem to be concerned that too much folate given throughout life creates its own cancer risk, and that giving it to pregnant women (as is currently recommended) creates cancer hazards for the fetus.

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Posted by Erika Check at 09:53 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

AACR: Tofu or not tofu?

If you're like me, you often find yourself confused by scientific advice on what to eat for good health. For every study that finds some miracle benefit to some food, another study always seems to come along and contradict the results of the first. This meeting is no exception. One study released yesterday claimed to have found a chemical reason why soy prevents cancer. But another study presented today claims the opposite, reporting that soy doesn't prevent colon cancer. So should you blend up that delicious tofu shake, or not?

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Posted by Erika Check at 12:17 AM |

April 16, 2007

AACR: Putting a price on life

How much is a month of life worth to you?

This is a question no one should have to ask herself, but cancer patients often must – for instance, in the United States, where 16 percent of patients are uninsured and drug costs are ballooning. Breast cancer treatment with Genentech’s drug Herceptin, for example, can cost $70,000.

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Posted by Erika Check at 08:41 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

AACR: Staying focused

Cancer researchers are embarking on a huge experiment that is attempting to deliver on science’s promise to usher in the era of personalized medicine. Led by the National Cancer Institute, the project is called the Cancer Genome Atlas. The idea is to catalog all the genetic mutations associated with cancer. The positive spin on this project is that it’s highly ambitious, but some have called it foolhardy. Tonight, a room of brain cancer researchers hashed over their portion of the Cancer Genome Atlas – a pilot project to catalog genetic mutations in one form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme. And, as scientists are wont to do, they spent more than an hour pointing out all the flaws with the design of the brain cancer part of the atlas.

Continue reading "AACR: Staying focused" »

Posted by Erika Check at 06:20 AM |

April 13, 2007

American Association for Cancer Research

Earlier detection, better surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and drugs means that more cancer patients live longer today than ever before. Yet it still kills more than 7 million people each year, accounting for around 12.5% of all deaths worldwide.

Erika Check is off to the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in LA this weekend, and she'll be sending back diary reports with all the latest news in the field. Stay tuned for her blog, from 15-18 April.

And find a collection of all our news stories on cancer in our in focus.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 01:41 PM |

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