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Date Posted: 12:07:42 02/24/02 Sun
Author: Shirleym
Subject: Advances in Cancer Treatments

About my father's cancer and developments in treatments in the reply, if you're interested in that sort of thing. :-)

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[> Advances in Cancer Treatments -- Shirleym, 12:17:33 02/24/02 Sun

The following article is from the Wall Street Journal. I've cut it short because it gets a little technical after the first part. My father's been battling bladder cancer for many years now (he was a smoker until his 50s) and bladder cancer is often a direct result of that. He started out having the little red spots cuaterized, but then the spots started showing up in the same place and the doctors feared that they'd make a hole in the bladder wall by zapping the same place too many times. The bladder wall doesn't regenerate so that would destroy it. So they started a treatment where the bladder is washed out with an almost dead tuberculosis bacterium. That killed the cancer for quite a few more years and then it stopped working too. So my father read everything he could get his hands on and found one doctor in Virginia who was testing Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) on bladder cancer. The tests were in the last stage and the doses had been worked out already, so he really got in on it at a good time. Since that treatment (about 9 months) he's been cancer free.

Anyway, here's the article. :-)

**********************************************************

New Treatments for Cancer Act
As Smart Bombs on Malignant Cells

By DAVID P. HAMILTON
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- February 22, 2002

Surgeons couldn't rid Sherri Putnam of a persistent liver tumor, but her doctor suggested that a high-powered magnet and a liquid mixture containing microscopic metal beads might get the job done.

Liver tumors are often lethal and are difficult to treat with surgery or ordinary chemotherapy. So Ms. Putnam, a mortgage processor in Vacaville, Calif., agreed to try the new procedure, which was developed by a San Diego start-up called FeRx Inc.

After using magnetic resonance imaging to take a snapshot of Ms. Putnam's liver, doctors positioned a powerful magnet over her tumor and injected her with tiny metallic particles that had been coated with a standard chemotherapy drug. The
magnetic field pulled the drug-coated beads through blood-vessel walls and into the tumor, poisoning her cancer cells without doing significant damage to her other tissues. After two treatments, Ms. Putnam's tumor was declared dead. "It was excellent news," she says.

Researchers are now racing to duplicate that result using a variety of other tools -- lasers, antibodies and even long chain-like molecules -- that can zap cancer cells
directly, often with traditional radiation and chemotherapy. The new treatments, some of which are already in use, may be able to act as smart bombs on tumors, using
well-tested agents, while avoiding much of the collateral damage that often accompanies chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Chemotherapy and radiation are highly effective at killing cancer cells. Unfortunately, they kill many normal cells as well, frequently leading to severe nausea, fatigue or
organ damage. If their cell-killing effects could be focused directly on tumors, patients would feel better and be able to withstand even higher doses of anticancer agents,
improving their odds of survival. Of course, there have been many unsuccessful attempts to develop "magic bullets" in the past. But new insights into the structure and chemical makeup of cancer cells are giving scientists ideas for new approaches.

One way to target tumors is so-called radioimmunotherapy, in which a radioactive isotope of iodine or yttrium is coupled to a genetically engineered antibody that sticks specifically to tumor cells. That's the approach taken by Idec Pharmaceuticals Corp. of San Diego and Corixa Corp. of Seattle, two biotech companies that are close to marketing antibody-based radiation treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of white blood cells.

Such cancerous cells are highly susceptible to radiation, but conventional treatment would require lethal full-body doses. Idec's Zevalin and Corixa's Bexxar, by contrast,
carry radioactive particles directly to the cancerous cells, irradiating and killing them. The patient's body develops new, cancer-free white-blood cells from its bone marrow,
and the isotopes decay into nonradioactive forms over the space of several days or weeks.

"There really is virtually no normal-organ toxicity," says Thomas Witzig, a cancer specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who has studied Zevalin in human trials. Idec received final approval for Zevalin from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday, while Bexxar faces additional FDA review.

Another promising area of treatment involves so-called photodynamic therapy, or PDT. Some light-sensitive drugs, many from a chemical class known as the porphyrins, are naturally drawn into rapidly dividing tumor cells. Laser light of a particular frequency can trigger a sequence of chemical events involving the drugs in those cells that kills tumors while leaving most healthy tissue unharmed. Fiber-optic lines can deliver laser light to internal tumors via endoscope.

While such therapy for cancer is close to a decade old and has been approved in the U.S. for esophageal and lung cancers, it is only now attracting wider attention. One
reason is that conservative doctors have been slow to adopt "hybrid" treatments that involve both drugs and medical devices.


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[> [> Wow, that's interesting...glad your dad is benefiting from these treatments. Keep us posted. -- PJ, 20:40:20 02/24/02 Sun


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[> [> That is interesting.... -- Darlene, 14:49:59 02/25/02 Mon

I ama Nuclear Med. Technologist and I read medical
journals all the time. This new procedure seems very
promising. Most MD's i come in contact with will not
consider new and experimental treatments, even when the old treatments don't seem to work as well.


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[> [> [> Wow Darlene, what an interesting line of work that must be... and what we've always suspected about "most MDs"... isn't it a shame. Thank goodness for the ones who have enough vision and passion to try something new. :-) -- Shirleym, 12:23:15 02/28/02 Thu


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[> [> Extremely interesting. I find the WSJ is usually pretty reliable in their reporting. -- Patty, 01:20:12 02/26/02 Tue


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