Treatment Information No comments yet

Microscopic Scales Weigh Up Cancer Therapies

By on November 18th, 2011

WHAT use would it be to weigh a single living cell? Microscopic scales that do just that may help doctors to predict how a person’s cancer will respond to anti-cancer drugs.

The scales are actually a tiny maze of fluid-filled channels, 10 to 15 micrometres wide, sitting on a chip attached to various sensors. Computer-controlled jets direct cells around the maze until one becomes trapped in a receptacle just big enough to hold it. The receptacle sits at the end of a springboard-like channel that vibrates at specific frequencies depending on the channel’s mass. When a cell is forced into this channel it displaces some of the fluid inside. This changes the frequency of vibration, which is monitored and used to weigh the cell.

Scott Manalis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have shown that the scales are able to weigh yeast cells accurately to within a few trillionths of a gram.

Manalis’s team then used them to monitor changes in cell growth in response to drugs. First, the researchers trapped single white blood cells within the scales. They left the cells to grow for 10 minutes, then replaced the glucose fluid in the scales with one containing sodium azide – a toxic chemical that damages cell membranes – and left the cells to grow for a further 10 minutes. As the cells grew, fluid was displaced, changing the frequency of vibration of the channel, which was monitored throughout. Cells grew at a much slower rate after the sodium azide solution was added (Lab On A Chip, DOI: 10.1039/c1lc20736a).

Manalis says the scales could be used to help develop personalised cancer therapies that could be tested on an individual’s cells. “We plan to determine if the growth response of tumour cells can be predictive of how a patient will respond to a therapy, he says. …source …more about cancer


Blogging, Treatment Information No comments yet

Alcohol Not Recommended For Girls With Family History Of Breast Cancer

By on November 17th, 2011

Adding to research linking alcohol to breast cancer risk, a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that adolescent girls with a family history of breast disease – either cancer or the benign lesions that can become cancer – have a higher risk of developing benign breast disease as young women than other girls. And unlike girls without a family history, this already-elevated risk rises with increasing alcohol consumption.

“The most common question we hear from women with a family history of breast disease is how can we prevent breast cancer in our daughters,” says epidemiologist Graham A. Colditz, MD, PhD, the Niess-Gain Professor of Surgery and senior author on the study published online Nov. 14 in the journal Cancer. “This points to a strategy to lower risk – or avoid increasing risk – by limiting alcohol intake.”

This study is one of the first to look at alcohol consumption in adolescents and the risk of breast disease. Most studies linking alcohol to the risk of developing breast cancer focus on women in their 40s, 50s and 60s and on their risk of invasive breast cancer, not the risk of early, benign lesions that may lead to invasive breast cancer.

One such study published Nov. 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which Colditz was a co-author, found a moderate increase in breast cancer risk with as few as three to six drinks per week for any adult women, regardless of family history.

“In the current study, we have tried to disentangle the effects of alcohol in women with a family history that includes both breast cancer and benign breast disease, compared to women with no family history,” Colditz says. “And we’re seeing the strongest effect of alcohol in women with breast disease in the family.”

The new study of younger women began in 1996 with more than 9,000 girls from all 50 states who are daughters of participants in the Nurses’ Health Study II. The girls were ages nine to 15 when they completed baseline questionnaires. Follow-up questionnaires over the next five years and surveys in 2003, 2005 and 2007 tracked family history, alcoholic beverage intake, height, weight, waist circumference and age of first menstrual period, among other factors that influence breast cancer risk. …source …more about breast cancer


Treatment Information No comments yet

Adding Radiation Therapy To Hormone Therapy Benefits Men with Locally Advanced Prostate Cancer

By on November 14th, 2011

For men with locally advanced or high-risk prostate cancer, treatment with a combination of radiation therapy and hormone therapy appears to be more effective than hormone therapy alone. These results were published in The Lancet.

Locally advanced prostate cancer refers to cancer that has spread through the prostate capsule but not to distant sites in the body. Treatment of locally advanced prostate cancer often includes androgen deprivation therapy (hormone therapy). Hormone therapy blocks male hormones from stimulating the growth of prostate cancer.

To determine whether the addition of radiation therapy to hormone therapy results in better outcomes than hormone therapy alone, researchers conducted a study among 1,205 men with locally advanced or high-risk prostate cancer. Half the men received hormone therapy alone and half received hormone therapy and radiation therapy.

  • Overall survival at seven years was 74% among men treated with radiation therapy and hormone therapy, compared with 66% among men treated with hormone therapy alone.
  • The addition of radiation therapy did not substantially increase side effects of treatment.

These results suggest that for men with locally advanced prostate cancer, treatment with a combination of hormone therapy and radiation therapy results in better overall survival than treatment with hormone therapy alone.

Reference: Warde P, Manson M, Ding K et al. Combined androgen deprivation therapy and radiation therapy for locally advanced prostate cancer: a randomised, phase 3 trial. Lancet. Early online publication November 3, 2011. …source …more about prostate cancer