When older patients do receive the treatment, it tends to be at a less toxic dose and over a shorter period than younger patients receive, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Clinical trials have shown that surgery with chemotherapy helps patients live longer than surgery alone but it is not an option always open to the elderly, said Dr. Robert Fletcher of Harvard Medical School.

The study, called Investigation of Serial Studies to Predict Your Therapeutic Response with Imaging and Molecular Analysis, or I-SPY2, will aim to use DNA to match the best drug to each individual patient, and to more quickly toss out approaches that do not work or that are too toxic.

The launch of the $26 million, five-year experiment will be announced at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) in Washington at http://www.visualwebcaster.com/I-SPY2-Launch.

Skp2 is involved in promoting cell cycle regulation, cell proliferation, cell growth and the formation of tumors, and it is overexpressed in a variety of human cancers, according to lead author Hui-Kuan Lin, Ph.D., an assistant professor in M. D. Anderson’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Oncology.

Lin and colleagues found that inactivating Skp2 after oncogenes are overexpressed stifles cancer growth by causing senescence - the irreversible loss of a cell’s ability to divide and grow. Harnessing the power of cellular senescence to push rapidly dividing cells into a dormant state might provide another way to prevent or control common malignancies like prostate cancer.

The study also lends new insights into the way the body handles fructose, compared to other sugars. The results may provide important clues to understanding the health effects of high fructose intake—including a recent study linking consumption of soft drinks to pancreatic cancer risk. The study was led by Anthony P. Heaney, M.D., of David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Body’s Handling of Fructose Is ‘Underdeveloped,’ Test Suggests

They said intensive radiation therapy - done in one to five treatments instead of the conventional 20 to 30 - provided more than double the rate of primary tumor control than seen in prior studies of conventional radiation therapy.

The findings suggest stereotactic body radiation therapy could “provide a significant step forward in the battle against this type of lung cancer,” Dr. Robert Timmerman of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, whose study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said in a statement.

The study included data from more than 89,500 patients collected from 1973 to 2006. There were 12,559 subsequent cancers, including 3,094 melanomas.

While not the most common form of skin cancer, melanoma is the most serious and most likely to be fatal. The American Cancer Society estimates that 68,720 Americans were diagnosed in 2009 with melanoma and that 6,850 Americans died from the disease. 

They report in an article to be published online March 15, 2010, in the journal Oncogene that a protein called “tau” promotes the formation of these microtentacles on breast tumor cells which break away from primary cancers and circulate in the bloodstream. While twisted remnants of tau protein have been seen in the brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, this is the first report that tau could play a role in tumor metastasis by changing the shape of cancer cells. These tau-induced microtentacles can help the cells reattach to the walls of small blood vessels to create new pockets of cancer.

“Our study demonstrates that tau promotes the creation of microtentacles in breast tumor cells. These microtentacles increase the ability of circulating breast tumor cells to reattach in the small capillaries of the lung, where they can survive until they can seed new cancers,” says the senior author, Stuart S. Martin, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center and associate professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Michael A. Matrone, Ph.D., is the study’s lead author.

“Breast cancer is the most common type of malignancy recorded in the cancer registries of almost all countries within the Eastern Mediterranean Region. In Iraq, the continuous rise in the incidence rate is associated with an obvious trend to affect premenopausal women,” said Nada A.S. Alwan, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Breast Cancer Research Unit at Baghdad University Medical College and the executive director of the newly established Iraqi National Cancer Research Program.

Alwan presented early data at the second AACR Dead Sea International Conference on Advances in Cancer Research: From the Laboratory to the Clinic, held March 7-10, 2010. 

Dr. Richard Ablin of the University of Arizona joined the ongoing debate over the blood test, saying the screening procedure is too costly and ineffective.

“I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven public health disaster,” Ablin wrote in a commentary for The New York Times.

“Obesity has long been established as a risk factor for cancer, but our study in colon cancer patients shows that obesity predicts a poorer prognosis after the cancer is surgically removed,” said Frank A. Sinicrope, M.D., professor of medicine and oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

There are approximately 150,000 new cases of colon cancer diagnosed each year in the United States, and colon cancer tends to affect men and women equally, said James Abbruzzese, M.D., chairman of the Department of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and an editorial board member of Clinical Cancer Research.