Rep. Norwood suffered from a chronic lung disease and later developed metastatic cancer that spread from his lung to his liver.

The vacancy created by Norwood’s death will be filled by a special election, to be held no fewer than 30 days after the vacancy is created, according to state law.

Richard Kelley, 91, died Wednesday at home after a long battle with cancer of the colon and liver. He was a retired salesman and was married to Clinton’s mother, Virginia, for 12 years before she died in 1994 from breast cancer.

Clinton spoke to more than 600 people at Kelley’s funeral, sharing his love for the man he said left the world with grace.

There are some things that happen in life where we can recall exactly where we were when it happened and heard of the tragedy. On the day the shuttle Challenger exploded I was in my tenth grade class watching it on television. The twentieth anniversary of the shuttle explosion brought back this memory and so did today when reading of Christopher Glenn’s death.

Christopher Glenn also was the distinctive voice to those who remember the Emmy-award winning “In the News.” The two and a half minute feature on one topic was broadcast every half hour during Saturday children’s programming on CBS. It debuted in September 1971 and ran for 5,000 episodes over thirteen seasons. He also was the anchor for CBS “World News Roundup” in 1999 after spending eleven years in a similar capacity for “The World Tonight.”

Glenn explained why he loved radio. “You don’t just sit there and stare at the pictures. You have to tell them the story and make them understand, and I think that that’s much more of a challenge for a journalist and makes it much more interesting in the long run.”

Christopher is survived by his wife, Dianne, two daughters and a sister.

Japanese scientists found the key were vitamin A compounds called carotenoids which give the fruit its orange color.

In the first study, scientists surveyed 1,073 people in the Japanese town, Mikkabi, in Shizuoka, who ate a high number of mandarin oranges. They found chemical markers in the population’s blood samples that were linked to a lower risk of liver disease, arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and insulin resistance (a condition associated with diabetes).

A second study found that drinking mandarin juice appeared to cut the chance of developing liver cancer in patients with chronic viral hepatitis.

After a year, no liver cancer was found in the group, compared to a rate of 8.9% among a group of 45 patients with the same condition who did not drink the juice. Meanwhile, scientists believe they have taken another step closer to preventing antibiotic-resistant infections from spreading.

The Japanese researchers admit more work is needed and plan to continue the study for five years. The findings could lead to new drugs to fight infections that commonly cause death in people with AIDS or cystic fibrosis, they said.

During the Thursday presentation at the Festival of Science in Norwich, Grant Stentiford of the Center for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science in Weymouth stated “Higher levels of cancer and other diseases were found in fish taken from estuaries with the highest levels of pollutants. The big question is, is the cancer we’re seeing in fish the same as what we see in humans?”

Healthy cells have a built-in process which means they commit suicide if something is wrong, a process which fails in cancer cells.

The University of Illinois team created a synthetic molecule which caused cancer cells to self-destruct.

Cancer experts said the study, in Nature Chemical Biology, offered “exciting possibilities” for new ways of treating the disease.

One of the hallmarks of cancer cells is their resistance to the body’s cell suicide signals, which allow them to survive and develop into tumors.

All cells contain a protein called procaspase-3, which the body should be able to turn into caspase-3 – an executioner enzyme.

But this transformation does not happen in cancer cells, even though certain types, such as colon cancer, leukemia, skin and liver cancers paradoxically have very high levels of procaspase-3.

The researchers examined more than 20,000 structurally different synthetic compounds to see if any could trigger procaspase-3 to develop into caspase-3.

They found the molecule PAC-1 did trigger the transformation, and cancer cells from mice and from human tumors could be prompted to self-destruct – a process called apoptosis.

The more procaspase-3 a cancer cell had, the less of the molecule was needed.

Healthy cells, such as white blood cells, were found to be significantly less affected by the addition of PAC-1 because they had much lower levels of procaspase-3, so cell-suicide could not be triggered.

When the scientists tested PAC-1 on cancerous and non-cancerous tissue from the same person, the tumor cells were 2,000-fold more sensitive to PAC-1.

Since different levels of procaspase-3 were found in the cell lines studied, the researchers suggest some patients would be more responsive to this therapy than others, so it might one day be possible to tailor treatments to individual patients.

Professor Paul Hergenrother, who led the research, said: “This is the first in what could be a host of organic compounds with the ability to directly activate executioner enzymes.

“The potential effectiveness of compounds such as PAC-1 could be predicted in advance, and patients could be selected for treatment based on the amount of procaspase-3 found in their tumour cells.”

Cancer Research UK expert Dr Michael Olson, who is based at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, said: “These findings present an exciting new therapeutic strategy for the treatment of some cancers.

“It remains to be seen which, if any tumour types consistently express elevated procaspase-3. That will tell us how many patients could potentially benefit from the drug.

“Clinical trials will be needed to confirm whether procaspase-3 causes any adverse effects in humans.”

Source: BBC News

“When we used the gene signature of immune cells in the liver, we could predict tumors that would metastasize in 92 percent of the samples we studied,” study leader Xin Wei Wang, head of the Liver Carcinogenesis Unit at the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research, said in a prepared statement.

They detected this unique pattern of activity in 17 genes contained in immune cells found in normal tissue surrounding a liver tumor. This set includes genes that encode messages for cytokines — immune cell proteins that send out cell-to-cell signals aimed at directing the immune response.

Increased levels of cytokines are associated with a poor prognosis in cancer patients.

“This is the first example where we can stratify HCC (heptocellular carcinoma) patients to identify those who would benefit from certain post-surgical treatments to prevent metastases and recurrence,” Wang said.

The study included 115 HCC patients. The findings were published in the August issue of Cancer Cell.

Source: Forbes

The report, prepared by eight medical centers around the country, analyzed more than 18,000 liver cancer cases recorded between 1981 and 2001, which found an upward trend in over liver cancer mortality.

As deaths from hepatitis B-related liver cancer didn’t increase during the period, the report said the surge could largely be attributed to rising mortality from hepatitis C-related liver cancer.

The report also found that the Yunlin-Jiayi-Tainan area was hardest hit by hepatitis C as the region’s liver cancer mortality was higher than the national average.

According to the report, about 40 percent to 50 percent of male liver cancer deaths in the region were hepatitis C patients, while the ratio among women in the three counties ranged between 60 percent and 80 percent.

Chen Chien-hung, a doctor at National Taiwan University Hospital’s department of internal medicine, said the high hepatitis C mortality in the Yunlin-Jiayi-Tainan region might be related to inappropriate medical treatment administered by unlicensed doctors there some 20 years. But he added that it’s just speculation that requires epidemiological surveys to verify.

Scientists have devised a way of using the bubbles to block blood supplies to tumours, effectively starving them to death.

The ingenious technique involves injecting tiny liquid droplets into the bloodstream and tracking them with ultrasound images until they reach the location of the tumour.

Once they are in place, the droplets are zapped with a high-intensity ultrasonic beam.

This triggers an explosion, in which a gas inside each droplet is released and makes them expand to 125 times their original size -blocking the blood vessel and shutting off the tumour’s supply of oxygen and nutrients.

The droplet changes shape from round to cylindrical, so it blocks the whole of the blood supply.

“It deforms into a long, sausage-shaped bubble that lodges in the blood vessel like a cork,” says Professor Joseph Bull, from the department of biomechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.

“Two or three doses of bubbles will block most of the blood flow, and without blood, the tumour dies.”

The therapy, called embolisation, is a major breakthrough for solid tumours such as kidney and liver cancers, which can be difficult to treat.

No side effects

Starving tumours of blood is seen as a promising way to tackle certain cancers. There are drugs that take a similar approach to shrinking malignant growths. But the big advantage of this new technique is it has no side effects, and allows doctors to pinpoint exactly where bubbles are formed, reducing the risk of disrupting blood flow to healthy tissue.

British surgeons already use other forms of emboli-sation to tackle kidney cancer, mainly in patients who are not healthy enough to undergo conventional surgery for tumour removal.

The patient is given a local anaesthetic. A catheter is inserted into the main blood vessel in the groin and fed through the body until its tip is next to the cancer.

Small pieces of gelatine sponge, or plastic beads, are injected through the tube into blood vessels, to staunch blood flow to the tumour. The patient stays in hospital at least one night to recover.

But the precision needed to put sponges or beads in exactly the right place means only highly-skilled surgeons can perform the procedure.

University of Michigan experts believe using gas bubbles is easier and more accurate. They inject tiny droplets that contain a compound called perfluorocarbon. At room temperature, this is a liquid. But when exposed to heat, it turns into an expanding gas.

Hundreds of droplets are squirted into the bloodstream and monitored as they spread around the body. They are so small they flow easily, without causing any blockages.

Although some bypass the tumour completely, others branch off down the blood vessels supplying it with nutrients.

As they do, doctors blast them with high-intensity focused ultrasound – a beam of sound waves that heats up the droplets. They swell and lodge in position, shutting off blood flow.

Although the technique is still being developed, the bubbles themselves are already widely used. Perfluorocarbons can help ventilate injured lungs by carrying oxygen deep into the airways.

Ed Yong, information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “Using bubbles would be much less invasive. But often, even after cutting off the blood supply, the cancer remains and could still spread.”

Hepatitis B can be transmitted through blood or sexual contact and can be passed to children through their pregnant mother during birth. Children may also pick up hepatitis B from constant close contact with infected family members. Because signs and symptoms do not usually appear until the cancer is in its later stages, liver cancer is seldom diagnosed early. That is why project director, Henry Pollack, MD, and principal investigator of the hepatitis B and hepatocellular carcinoma project at NYU’s Center for the Study of Asian American Health launched a program to inform Asian immigrants and their families to educate them about hepatitis B and help them get tested. If they are positive then they will get them into treatment.