Results published at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, said that Abraxane in combination with Xeloda may be an effective treatment option for patients with metastatic breast cancer.Abraxane is a newer form of Taxol that uses albumin, a natural protein found in the body, to deliver high concentrations of the active ingredient into the cancer cells and has fewer side effect than Taxol. Abraxane treatments last around 30 minutes compared with 3 hours for Taxol.

Researchers conducted a small clinical trial that included 38 patients with metastatic breast cancer. Complete disappearance of cancer was achieved in nearly 9 percent of patients. Partial responses were achieved in about 44 percent of patients. Disease stabilization was seen in almost 33 percent of study participants.

Even though the study was a small one, researchers conclude that it appears that treatment with Abraxane and Xeloda may be effective for patients with metastatic breast cancer.

In September of 1998, the FDA approved Herceptin to treat breast cancer after it had become metastatic. Few days back,  the FDA approved Herceptin’s use for women diagnosed with breast cancer just after surgery. The drug is already widely prescribed for adjuvant therapy even without the FDA’s approval, a practice called off-label use. Off-label use means that a prescription drug is being prescribed for a purpose not listed on the product’s label. This is a common and acceptable practice by doctors and the Food and Drug Administration.Clinical trials were conducted that showed women who received Herceptin (trastuzumab) given along with chemotherapy had fewer relapses than those who only received chemotherapy. Twenty to thirty percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have this genetic alteration of the HER2 gene and could benefit by being treated with Herceptin.

Farrah Fawcett has been battling anal cancer for six weeks now and is two-thirds of the way through an intensive six-week regimen of chemotherapy and radiation.

Fawcett, 59, has been enduring radiation therapy five days per week since October 13 and is taking the side effects — fatigue, nausea, sleeplessness, and pain — in stride. Fortunately, she has a strong support network that includes Ryan O’Neal, her son Redmond, her father James, and most recently — Charlie’s Angels.

On November 1, Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson joined Fawcett at her Beverly Hills condominium and did what they say they’ve been doing ever since finding fame and friendship on Charlie’s Angels 30 years ago. They talked and laughed and gossiped and ate. Just like old times.

Doctors say Fawcett is responding well to treatment as she charges forward. With a little help from her friends — and angels

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors have announced that the addition of the chemotherapy drug epirubicin to standard chemotherapy can help more women to survive early breast cancer.

Chemotherapy is given after surgery to patients suffering from breast cancer to destroy any molecules of cancer that might have spread to other parts of the body. The standard chemotherapy treatment involves a combination of three drugs and is known as CMF (a cocktail of clophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil). In the study, doctors have announced that a chemotherapy “super-cocktail” given to women with breast cancer reduced deaths by more than 30 per cent, compared with standard treatment. This news comes from two British studies that together looked at 2,400 patients with early breast cancer. Both studies show better survival rates with epirubicin in addition to standard chemotherapy.

In the study, half of the patients were treated with the standard chemotherapy while the other half were given the drug epirubicin along with the standard chemotherapy.

The researchers found that in group of patients treated with epirubicin plus chemotherapy, 82 percent lived for at least 5 years and 76 percent did not have relapses. Whereas in the patients treated only with the standard chemotherapy, only 75 percent lived for at least five years and only 69 percent did not have relapses.

Chris Poole, the consultant medical oncologist at the University of Birmingham, said: “The results show conclusively that the addition of epirubicin to chemotherapy has a significant impact on survival in early stage breast cancer.”

Dr Poole said that most women with breast cancer in the UK would be treated with epirubicin. “But whether they are getting it in the right dose and on the right schedule is another matter,” he said.

High doses of epirubicin were administered for the first four cycles of treatment but it was then replaced with standard chemotherapy, maximizing the impact of the drug but minimizing the long-term risks, such as leukemia.

The women were recruited to the study between 1996 and 2001 to look at the recurrence of tumors and survival rates. Unlike the hormonal treatment Herceptin, which is effective in only 20 per cent of patients with oestrogen-positive breast cancer, chemotherapy works for all women?

“It is an old-fashioned, blunderbuss treatment. It does seem to be uniformly effective,” Dr Poole said.

The evidence showed that the effects of hormonal drugs such as Herceptin given after chemotherapy had a cumulative effect, on top of any survival gain achieved by the chemotherapy, Dr Poole said.

The researchers maintain that further studies need to be conducted before the doctors are able to determine the best chemotherapy regimen for an individual patients caner treatment.

The results of the studies, funded by Cancer Research UK and others are published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In previous studies there has not shown to be an increase in survival when adding chemotherapy after surgery for gastric cancer compared with surgery alone. Most U.S. patients that are diagnosed with cancer of the stomach or lower esophagus have locally advanced disease that is hard to cure.The MAGIC trial represents a landmark study in gastric cancer, as it is the first trial to demonstrate a survival benefit for pre- and postoperative chemotherapy. Researchers studied 503 patients with cancer of the stomach, esphagogastric junction or lower esophagus. One arm of the trial received three preoperative and three postoperative cycles of chemotherapy, the other arm of the study had only surgery.

The trial concluded that the chemotherapy group had smaller resectable tumors with negative margins, fewer patients had advanced nodal disease and the five year survival rate increased by 13 percent. It was noted that this is a significant advance for the treatment of this disease.

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) comprises the majority of lung cancers.According to the results presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology, the combination consisting of Platinol (cisplatin) plus Navelbine (vinorelbine) improves survival among non-small cell lung cancer patients whose cancer has been surgically removed.

Early stage lung cancer is usually treated with surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy. The use of adjuvant chemotherapy has not shown in the past to have improved survival.

This study included data from almost two thousand patients with early stage lung cancer. Patients were treated with either adjuvant Platinol/Navelbine or no chemotherapy at all. The study showed that at five years 55 percent of patients who were treated with the chemotherapy combination were alive compared to only 46 percent who received no further treatment after surgery.

The researchers concluded that adjuvant chemotherapy consisting of Platinol/Navelbine improves survival at five years among patients with NSCLC who were able to have their cancer completely removed by surgery.

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center specialists have figured out how to accurately test drive chemotherapy drugs to learn in advance which drug treatments offer each individual pancreatic cancer patient the best therapeutic journey.Test driving cancer drugs is used widely to test cancer therapies, the Hopkins design is personalized to each patient who has relapsed after an initial course of chemotherapy. The standard drug given at this point is gemcitabine, which has a success rate of less than 10 percent.

Reporting on their work in a recent issue of Clinical Cancer Research and at the September meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, the Hopkins team said it took tiny bits of a patient’s tumor removed after surgery, and implanted them into one or two mice. This process currently requires about six months to get the information on which drugs work best.

Manuel Hidalgo, M.D. Ph.D., associate professor at Hopkin’s Kimmel Cancer Center says that “In the meantime, most patients are receiving their first rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. This information can guide therapy once patients relapse, which is generally in nine to twelve months with pancreatic cancer”.

Pancreatic cancer accounts for more than 33,000 new cases in the United States and almost as many deaths. Less than five percent of patients living beyond five years.

Chemobrain, a term used to describe the mental fog and confusion some women experience after chemotherapy treatment, is very real and researchers who studied the frontal lobe brain activity of women suffering from the occurrence have an explanation for why chemobrain happens. Based on a study done by University of California researchers, chemotherapy drugs disrupt the brain’s metabolism and blood flow.

“The same area of the frontal lobe that showed lower resting metabolism displayed a substantial leap in activity when the patients were performing the memory exercise,” said Daniel Silverman, the UCLA associate professor who led the study. “In effect, these women’s brains were working harder than the control subjects to recall the same information.”

The current study is published in the online edition of Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.

New Zealand scientists have discovered that Broccolis may hold the key to kill cancer cells. A team from Otago University’s Christchurch school of medicine has found that compounds from cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts and watercress help kill cancer cells which are resistant to other treatments.

As per their research, the naturally occurring chemical compounds known as isothiocyanates cause cell-suicide in cancer cells, including in cells with high levels of the protein Bcl-2. The protein makes cells resistant to normal cell-suicide process, the key to removing damaged cells from the body.

“A cancer cell with a lot of Bcl-2 has increased resistance to chemotherapy drugs that are used to destroy the tumor. We’ve found that Bcl-2 can’t protect cancer cells against certain isothiocyanates,” said lead researcher Dr Mark Hampton. The study has recently been published in the American journal, Cancer Research.

“This has provided us with a very valuable clue. Isothiocyanates alter many different proteins in a cell, but by focusing on proteins that are only modified by the isothiocyanates that kill the cancer cells, we have discovered a protein that could potentially control cell death,” said Dr Hampton.

The information could prove valuable for designing and testing more refined chemotherapy drugs based on naturally occurring isothiocyanates. Ideally, a new drug would be effective only against tumor cells.

A test that measures the amounts of two members of the same protein family – one of which appears to act as an oncogene, and the other as a tumor suppressor – helps identify patients with breast cancer who will likely benefit from chemotherapy and those who won’t, according to researchers.

OncoPlan, a test is already commercially available, and it has been shown to predict the aggressiveness of tumors and disease recurrence after surgery in breast, colon and stomach cancers. Now researchers believe that it may help predict as to which breast cancer patients would benefit most from chemotherapy.

A study was presented at the first meeting on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic Development; researchers looked at the two forms of protein measured by OncoPlan in 2,380 women with breast cancer. Out of these 717 had undergone chemotherapy.

They found that the women who had low levels of one of the proteins and did not receive chemotherapy had very poor outcomes. The same women who did receive chemotherapy, however, had a twofold reduced risk of relapsing and dying from their disease. The women who had high levels of the protein were much more likely to survive their disease, and appeared to derive no additional benefit from chemotherapy. However, more research is needed to clarify the ability of OncoPlan in predicting outcomes of chemotherapy.

A. Raymond Frackelton Jr., an associate professor at Brown University and vice president of Research at Catalyst Oncology (the company marketing OncoPlan), said

“But even at this point, the results are very exciting because, with further validation in clinical trials, OncoPlan, which is already being used to predict disease aggressiveness, will help to ensure that individual patients receive the most beneficial therapies”