Cancer Treatment News
Anti-Estrogen Drugs May Be Effective Lung Cancer Treatment
New research has found that a long-known drug to help treat breast cancer may also be used to reduce death risks from lung cancer as well. The drug is an anti-estrogen and has been known for nearly 30 years.
The study can be found in Cancer, a journal published online.
The drug, called tamoxifen, was shown to decrease lung cancer death risks in women with breast cancer. Researchers claim the results may be premature to use this drug as a treatment option for lung cancer patients, however.
Researchers believe this drug may be instrumental for lung cancer patients as lung cancer is believed to be caused at least somewhat by estrogen.
Another finding experts have explained is that in previous studies, lung cancer risks were shown to increase during menopause as women underwent hormone replacement therapy. Based on that, researchers believed the use of an anti-estrogen might be an effective treatment option for lung cancer as well.
For this study, researchers examined health records of 6,655 women. Each woman had a breast cancer diagnosis, and nearly half of the women were treated with an anti-estrogen drug, primarly tamoxifen.
For women receiving anti-estrogen treatment, lung cancer death risks were nearly 90 percent lower than in women who did not receive treatment.
Limitations on this study could have been the sample size, as only 40 women developed lung cancer.
Additionally, some studies involving mice have explained that tamoxifen may increase lung cancer risks.
Compiling all information, researchers firmly believe additional studies need to be performed.
New blood test key to future of cancer treatment
A new cancer test that performs a liquid biopsy in patients garnered widespread headlines last week, but it’s not going to immediately transform treatment of the disease.
In some ways the most significant aspect of the test may be that it highlights the promise of both early cancer detection and personalized medicine, two key areas of medical research that may, one day, combine to end much of the menace of cancer.
“I’m pretty optimistic about the future of cancer treatment,” said Dr. Kent Osborne, director of the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine.
“I think right now we’re just at the tip of the iceberg with the problem, but we now have the tools to work through them. It’s an exciting time.”
The new blood test, developed by Boston scientists and to be brought to market by Johnson & Johnson, is driven by something akin to a hairbrush with 78,000 tiny bristles.
Blood passes through the bristles, which are far enough apart to let red and white blood cells pass through but can trap larger tumor cells. In addition, there are biological particles on the bristles — antibodies – that stick to cancer cells. The goal is to capture stray cancer cells shed by tumors as they spread through the body – no easy thing as fewer than 1 out of billion cells in the blood may be cancerous even with an aggressively spreading disease.
Initially, scientists say, the test will be used on cancer patients who have undergone therapy to determine if the cancer has come back, and if so, how the resurgent cancer cells have mutated.
Tests for mutations
This is one of the areas that Massachusetts General Hospital, Sloan-Kettering, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston will study with a $15 million grant from the Stand Up to Cancer telethon, run by the American Association for Cancer Research.
“A tumor may shrink after initial treatment,” said Dr. John Heymach, an associate professor at M.D. Anderson who will be involved in the clinical trials in Houston.
“But afterward, individual cancer cells often develop secondary mutations. We want to know if we can use this test to identify those secondary mutations because, if so, we have different drugs that may be able to treat secondary mutations,” Heymach said.
The test, in essence, combines both cancer detection and personalized medicine in a tidy bundle. This may provide a glimpse into the future of cancer therapy.
In terms of detection, scientists have a ways to go. Indeed, it may never be possible to detect very early cancers from a single blood test, Heymach said.
Whereas a spreading cancer may not shed that many tumor cells, it produces hundreds to thousands times more cells than an early cancer.
For now the best way to detect tumors early is a CT scan, which can find tumors as small as a sugar cube.
Researching proteins
But in Houston labs and across the country, scientists are trying to develop an array of technologies to sniff out cancer in its early stages, when it’s most vulnerable.
In addition to looking for cancer cells in blood, scientists have also turned to identifying proteins associated with tumors as well as small bits of RNA – material like DNA that contains genetic information – that appear to correlate with cancer.
“A lot of groups are looking at different biomarkers,” said Osborne, the Baylor physician, who is working with RNA material. “You can see the potential if we find some markers that tell us there’s a cancer there before we can see it on an X-ray.”
The blood test, with its ability to capture cancer cells for analysis, extends the potential of personalized medicine, the notion that by better understanding the biological nature of a person’s illness, a better treatment can be tailored to the patient.
On average, drugs work in about 50 percent of patients, said David Gorenstein, associate dean for research at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston. Doctors want to do much better.
The classic example of personalized medicine comes from the drug Herceptin.
Complex challenge
Clinical trials initially showed the drug had only a mild beneficial effect on patients. Then scientists discovered that women whose breast cancer tumors produced an excessive amount of a certain protein, about one-quarter of patients, responded very well to treatment with Herceptin. Patients who didn’t produce large amounts of the protein saw no benefit.
The promise of personalized medicine is that, by understanding the genes and proteins involved in various cancers, doctors can gain a much better understanding of how to attack a disease with various drugs.
But the personalized medicine successes such as Herceptin are so far the exception, rather than the rule, when it comes to pinpointing the right drug for a disease.
“Biology is very, very complex,” Gorenstein said. “We have 20,000 genes, half a million proteins, and they all interact through signaling. We have mapped the human genome, but we don’t understand what all the genes are doing, nor all of the networks and pathways of protein interactions that constitute life.
“There’s a huge amount of unknowns. But the technologies that have developed over the last 10 years have rapidly accelerated the process by which we can understand these things.”