The results of the first effort involving kidney tumors was published in 2009, but now they’ve taken the science and directed it at breast cancer tumors, specifically the tumor initiating cancer stem cells. These stem cells are hard to kill because they don’t divide very often and many anti-cancer strategies are directed at killing the cells that divide frequently.

The Wake Forest Baptist research findings are reported online ahead of April print publication in the journal Biomaterials. The research is a result of a collaborative effort between Wake Forest School of Medicine, the Wake Forest University Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, and Rice University. Lead investigator and professor of biochemistry Suzy V. Torti, Ph.D., of Wake Forest Baptist, said the breast cancer stem cells tend to be resistant to drugs and radiotherapy, so targeting these particular cells is of great interest in the scientific community.

Their study appeared in a recent issue of Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research.

Chronic inflammation is known to influence risk of several cancers, including ovarian cancer. The researchers identified 27 genes that are involved in inflammation and sought to determine whether inter-individual differences in these genes were related to risk of ovarian cancer. To do that they determined the frequency of 162 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced “snips”) in DNA extracted from a blood sample provided by approximately 900 women with ovarian cancer (cases) and 1000 cancer-free women (controls). Whenever a SNP is observed it means that there are two forms (alleles) of the gene and the least common one is termed the “minor allele.” The frequency of 21 of the 162 SNPs differed between the cases and controls and was subsequently examined in a larger study that included 3,100 cases and 2,100 controls from five independent studies. 

“Breast cancer is the leading contributor to cancer incidence and cancer mortality in women worldwide, with 1,383,500 new cases in 2008. In the United States in 2008, 41 percent of these women were aged 65 years or older at diagnosis. Because breast cancer incidence increases with increasing age, changing demographics and continuously increasing life expectancy will further enlarge the number of older women confronted with breast cancer,” according to background information in the article. “In addition to classic tumor-related prognostic factors, patient characteristics may be associated with breast cancer outcome.”

Willemien van de Water, M.D., of the Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, and colleagues conducted a study to assess disease-specific mortality among age groups in postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. The study consisted of an analysis of 9,766 patients enrolled in the TEAM (Tamoxifen Exemestane Adjuvant Multinational) randomized clinical trial between January 2001 and January 2006. Age at diagnosis was categorized as younger than 65 years (n = 5,349), 65 to 74 years (n = 3,060), and 75 years or older (n = 1,357).

Although the results don’t necessarily translate into real practice, that means more than a million women might be offered the tests, which come with a hefty price tag and possible hazards, researchers say.

“Currently the evidence suggests that the harms of ovarian cancer screening exceed the benefits,” said Dr. Laura-Mae Baldwin of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Conventional imaging and biopsy are not always enough to diagnose and characterize suspected metastatic breast cancers, especially for patients who cannot receive repeated biopsies due to the location of the cancer or other existing illnesses. It is estimated that 75 percent of breast tumors show estrogen receptor activity at the point of diagnosis, and that estrogen receptor expression is an indicator of not only active cancer lesions, but patients’ potential response to therapy, as well.

Researchers found that whole-body positron emission tomography (PET) with 16a-¹⁸F-fluoro-17b-estradiol (¹⁸F-FES), a molecular imaging technique, provides an entirely non-invasive means of capturing estrogen receptor expression in estrogen receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer. It has the potential to help physicians make more accurate judgments about extent of disease, specifically whether anti-hormonal therapies would be beneficial for patients who had inconclusive assessments using more conventional methods. 

The incidence of fatal complications was 1.5 percent in patients who received any of the three drugs, which block the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) tyrosine kinase receptors in cancer cells, according to the study published February 6 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. This is compared to a 0.7 percent incidence in patients given standard treatments or placebos.

The study looked at three drugs: sorafenib (Nexavar), sunitinib (Sutent), and pazopanib (Votrient). Sorafenib is approved to treat kidney and liver cancer, sunitinib to treat kidney cancer and gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST), and pazopanib to treat kidney cancer.

And neither can we at the Black Women’s Health Imperative understand why Black women have not benefited from the progress being made in research and new technologies. Our mission in launching a new educational campaign is to raise questions, seek understanding, and call attention to what is happening to young Black women.

This is what we know.

We know that although Black women have a lower breast cancer incidence rate than other women, Black women are dying at a significantly higher rate than any other group of women. This fact is more complex than many may think. And most alarmingly, we don’t know why.

“We knew from our earlier study that blacks with advanced breast cancer were less likely to be treated with radiation, so we expected to see that their survival would be poorer because of that,” says Steve R. Martinez, assistant professor of surgical oncology at University of California, Davis.

“We were surprised to find that blacks fare worse regardless of whether they receive radiation therapy and actually appear to be less responsive to one of our most important treatments.”

“Some of the things that we can do for prevention we’ve known about for a long time, but they’re hard to do, like tobacco cessation,” says Judy Garber, MD, MPH, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “Stopping smoking would have a huge impact on cancer worldwide. And chewing tobacco, which is a lesser problem in the US, is a big problem in places like India, and for World Cancer Day, you have to think broadly about this.”

World Cancer Day was started by the International Union Against Cancer, which includes the United Nations and World Health Organization. The goal of the day is to raise cancer awareness around the world and help devise strategies to fight the disease. By highlighting prevention, organizers say people can pinpoint lifestyle choices that put them at greater risk for cancer, such as smoking, excessive alcohol intake and sun exposure.

The non-invasive procedure – called Tumor Treating Fields (TTF) – is delivered using a portable device – called the NovoTTF-100A System made by Novocure. The TTF procedure uses alternating electrical fields to disrupt the rapid cell division exhibited by cancer cells.

“Patients with recurrent GBM present a significant treatment challenge,” said Santosh Kesari, MD, PhD, director of Neuro-Oncology at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. “The initial clinical research for the approval trial demonstrated that, compared to patients who were treated with chemotherapy, patients treated with NovoTTF achieved comparable survival times, had fewer side effects, and reported improved quality of life.”