Lupeol, a compound in fruits like mangoes, grapes and strawberries, appears to be effective in killing and curbing the spread of cancer cells in the head and neck, a study in the University of Hong Kong has found.

The study, conducted by the university’s Faculty of Medicine, revealed that lupeol, a compound rich in fruits, selectively targeted and killed cancer cells. Using a mouse animal model, lupeol dramatically decreased tumor volume and suppressed local metastasis while bearing minimal effect on surrounding tissue and other vital organs like liver and kidney.

“It can suppress the movement of cancer cells and suppress their growth and it is found to be even more effective than conventional drugs (eg. cisplatin),” said Anthony Yuen, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s surgery department.
“It’s even more effective if we combine it with chemotherapy drugs, and has very little side effects,” he said.

Interestingly, lupeol was found to be more effective and more potent than conventionally used chemotherapeutic drug, cisplatin, by approximately three-fold in terms of tumor volume and degree of metastasis suppression.

Besides, when lupeol was used in combination with cisplatin, the anti-tumor activity of the chemotherapeutic drug could be enhanced by 40-fold.

The above research result was published in the international scientific journal Cancer Research in September, 2007.

Head and neck cancer includes cancers of the nose, oral cavity, salivary gland, etc. In the year 2004, 2,087 new cases were diagnosed in Hong Kong, with the number of new cases increasing steadily every year.

Human papilloma virus infection, alcohol and tobacco consumption and low fruits and vegetables intake all contribute to the increased risk of head and neck cancer development.

The university was in the hope that the findings will also show people that only a slight change in their everyday meal or a small change in their choice of food intake may have an astounding impact on cancer prevention and therapy.

“Conventional drugs made the mice a lot thinner, but lupeol mice retained their bulk.” Emaciation is usually viewed as a bad sign in the fight against cancer.

Yuen hopes lupeol can be applied to other cancers that are similarly dependent on the NFkB protein to grow and spread.

“It may be possible to use (lupeol) in other cancers because it is able to suppress the NFkB protien, which is activated in many cancers like prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer,” Yuen said.

Bladder cancer is diagnosed in 55,000 – 60,000 individuals annually in the United States. Patients whose cancer has spread to deeper tissues in the bladder and/or nearby lymph nodes may be treated with a radical cystectomy, the surgical removal of the bladder and nearby lymph nodes.

This approach may be able to cure the patient, however recurrences do occur. Researchers want to find out which patients may be more susceptible to a recurrence so that they can either monitor them more closely or treat them more aggressively to reduce the risk of recurrence.

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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 a clinical trial conducted at the University of Nottingham, scientists gave a vaccine to 67 colorectal cancer patients before and after surgery to remove the cancerous tumors. The British researchers say they have developed a vaccine that stimulates the immune system to fight colorectal cancer cells.Vaccine trials are not new in the search for effective cancer treatments but many times they are given as a last resort and are not effective. The vaccine is named 105AD7. The antibody in the vaccine was cloned from a patient who survived seven years despite liver metastasis from colorectal cancer. Lindy Durrant, study senior author and professor of cancer immunotherapy said “This is very unusual, as most patients die within a year of getting liver metastasis. I thought if this antibody had helped this patient, if we could clone it, it might help others”.

The researchers reported in the current issue of Clinical Cancer Research that the vaccine helped stimulate immune cell production in up to seventy percent of the patients studied.

Bacteria that can cause deadly infections in humans and animals have shown promise in treating cancer by “eating” tumors from the inside out.

Two new studies at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have demonstrated that, combined with specially-packaged anti-cancer drugs, the bacterial therapy’s prospects for cancer eradication has dramatically improved.

Boffins conducting the studies, which were carried out on mouse models, found that genetically-modified bacteria called Clostridium novyi-NT (C.novy-NT) have a special taste for oxygen-starved environments much like those found in the core of cancer cell clusters.

“It is not difficult to kill cancer cells. The challenge is killing them while sparing normal cells,” said Bert Vogelstein, M.D., professor and co-director of the Ludwig Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

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A new technique has been developed at Singapore’s National University Hospital to detect cancer in its earliest stages, a team of researchers said on Saturday.

Called an “optical biopsy,” the technique can detect so-called pre-cancers – collections of a few hundred malignant cells lurking among millions of healthy cells – that usually fly under the radar of standard cancer screenings.  

By using near-infrared fluorescence imaging, doctors may spot cancer risk before any physical signs appear.

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An experimental vaccine may help colorectal cancer patients battle the disease. This vaccine developed in the U.K. stimulated the production of killer T cells in up to 70 of colorectal cancer patients.

Researchers at the University of Nottingham cloned an antibody called 105AD7 from a patient with colorectal cancer who survived seven years with liver metastases.

“This is the first vaccine shown to stimulate TNF-alpha — an immune system protein that is very effective at killing cancer cells,” says senior author Professor Lindy Durrant, from the University of Nottingham in England.

The study involved 67 patients, average age 66, with colorectal cancer of varying severity. They were randomized to receive 100 mcg of 105AD7, 105AD7 with BCG (a bacteria used to stimulate the immune system in cancer patients) during the first immunization followed by 105AD7 alone, or no treatment.

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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.

Results of a phase II clinical trial, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, says that breast cancer patients who experience worsening of bone metastases during bisphosphonate therapy can improve pain control by switching to another bisphosphonate called Zometa (zoledronic acid).Researchers conducted the trial among 31 patients with metastatic breast cancer and wanted to see the effect of switching from one bisphosphonate to another. All study participants have been treated with one of the bisphosphonate drugs — Aredia or Bonefos. Zometa was administered once a month for three months.

After eight weeks of Zometa, 13 of the 31 patients, 42 percent reported a reduction in pain. Researchers concluded that for breast cancer patients with worsening bone metastasis switching to Zometa can improve pain. Results of this trial need to be confirmed by a Phase III clinical trial.

Results from the largest study of men with prostate cancer treated with high-dose, intensity modulated radiation (IMRT) show that 89 percent of men were disease free eight years later. Patients were treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and classified into prognostic risk groups. After an average of eight years, 89 percent of the men in the favorable risk group were disease-free and none of the men in any group developed secondary cancers as a result of the radiation treatments.This report, published in the October 2006 issue of The Journal of Urology, is the first description of long term outcomes for prostate cancer patients using IMRT. Intensity modulated radiation is an improved form of three-dimensional conformal radiation (3D-CRT). IMRT uses enhanced planning treatment software that more precisely targets the prostate, allowing the beam of radiation to deliver a high dose to the tumor target while sparing the adjacent bladder and rectum from exposure to the higher amounts of radiation.

Dr. Michael J. Zelefsky, Chief of the Brachytherapy Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, said “This study confirms that we can improve patients’ quality of life by reducing the side effects of radiotherapy while maintaining disease-free survival.”