Early success in cancer drug trial gives patients 'promising' future

A London hospital’s trial of a prostate cancer drug has been stopped early because it was so successful doctors felt it would be "unethical" to deny the treatment to other patients.

By Edward Malnick

1:41PM BST 24 Sep 2011

 

Medics halted tests of the life-extending drug because it would have been “unethical” not to offer the treatment to all 922 cancer sufferers taking part in the trial.

Patients who were given the drug found that it eased pain and caused only minor side effects.

The new drug accurately targets tumours using alpha radiation, which doctors conducting the study said is the most effective form of radiation to eliminate cancer because it limits damage to surrounding tissue.

Dr Chris Parker, lead researcher on the project at the Royal Marsden Hospital, said: “It’s more damaging. It takes one, two, three hits to kill a cancer cell compared with thousands of hits for beta particles.”

The drug, Radium-223 Chloride – known as Alpharadin TM – will also do less damage to surrounding tissue because it accurately targets calls, the doctors said.

Speaking at an international gathering of cancer experts, Dr Parker, a consultant clinical oncologist, said: “They have such a tiny range, a few millionths of a metre. So we can be sure that the damage is being done where it should be.”
Patients taking the drug has a 30 per cent lower rate of death compared top patients taking a placebo pill.
“It would have been unethical not to offer the active treatment to those taking placebo,” Dr. Parker said.
Radium-223 has “a completely different safety profile” to chemotherapy, he added.
The trial’s results were presented this week at the 2011 European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress in Stockholm.
The researchers, who have pointed out the urgent need for an effective treatment for prostate cancer, will now submit their findings for approval by regulators.
Prof Gillies McKenna, Cancer Research UK’s radiotherapy expert said: “This appears to be an important study using a highly targeted form of radiation to treat prostate cancer that has spread to the bones.
“This research looks very promising and could be an important addition to approaches available to treat secondary tumours – and should be investigated further.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8786451/Early-success-in-cancer-drug-trial-gives-patients-promising-future.html

The True Story of An Immortal Woman

The True Story of An Immortal Woman

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 01:47AM

Well, since I tend to forget what I've read three months after reading it, I'm going to jot down some notes on what is an unbelievable true story.

It's the story of Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951), a woman who died far too young from a vicious case of cervical cancer that blanketed her internal organs in very short order. After her treatments, her skin was left charred from the chemicals used by her doctors. When all was said and done, her primary physician said he has never seen anything like it--before or since. Both the tumors and condition of her skin were beyond imagination.

But that's where the story begins. Unknown to Henrietta and her family, the doctors took tissue samples during one of her check-ups to use in their experiments; namely, to try and grow her cells in the lab, something that hasn't been done before. It was expected to fail like all the previous attempts, but it didn't. In fact, these "immortal cells" are still alive today. If you took all of the HeLa (Henrietta Lacks) cells produced over the last 60 years, they would weight a combined 50 million metric tons.

Her cells were instrumental in many medical advancements, including cancer research, the research of various viruses, HIV research, the effects of the atom bomb, in vitro fertilization, cloning, gene mapping, and the development of the polio vaccine. Henrietta Lacks, who had to be tended to in the "colored" wing of the hospital, would--through her cells--save millions of lives, and one has to wonder how the racist people of that day would have grumbled about a non-white woman being the source of so much good.

The dilemma is this...her doctors took her cells without permission, replicated them without permission and sold them without permission. Millions have been made from her cells. And while the research Henrietta's cells enabled has benefited millions, it has not benefited her own family, who cannot even afford basic medical insurance. Henrietta's husband couldn't afford to fight his cancer with the medicines that were created through research that was largely thanks to his wife's cells. That's pretty screwed up.

Obviously, her cells went to help the greater good. But there are two primary concerns here; (1) why did she (and her family) get nothing in return while others have profited, and (2) why were they able to take something that was as personal as her own DNA and ship it out worldwide without consent? Both have a simple answer: Then, and now, doctors can do pretty much what they want with the tissues they extract during surgery, etc. While you can go after someone for copyright infringement for publishing one of your diary entries or photos without permission, you likely have no legal recourse if a physician shares your genetic material--which contains the DNA that tells everything about you, stuff you don't even know about yourself--across the globe.

What made her cells so special?

This is the question I kept asking as I read through the book. As it turns out, the cells taken from Henrietta were cancer cells from her cervix. Now, each time normal cells reproduce through mitosis, the DNA bits called the telomeres get shorter and shorter, eventually resulting in cell death; ie, they can't replicate anymore and eventually die off (the number of times a cell can divide is called the Hayflick limit). Cancer cells, on the other hand, have an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds the telomeres, so unlike with regular cells that continually get shorter, cancer cells do not...they can be "immortal" because they are constantly regenerating instead of slowly disappearing. But other cancer cells were still not as aggressive as the HeLa cells...there's more to it...

Henrietta contracted HPV (apparently, 90% of all sexually active adults have become infected with at least one strain of HPV during their lifetimes). Long, complicated story short, the HPV virus turned off what is called her "P53 tumor suppressor" gene which allowed the cancer to flourish. The cancer AND the HPV AND Henrietta's genetics--the combination of those three things--are what makes HeLa cells so aggressive and easy to cultivate. They are so aggressive, in fact, that scientists have had a hard time keeping them isolated and millions of dollars have been lost through tainted results where the HeLa cells have spread to experiments that should've been HeLa free.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. To read more about it, I highly recommend the book, "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot.

http://chrisheiser.squarespace.com/journal/2010/2/23/the-true-story-of-an-immortal-woman.html