Howard Waage ---- Editor
Where: Our meeting will be in the Bennett & Suzy Katz Cancer Resource Center on the 1st Floor of the two-story redwood Education Building behind Santa Cruz Dominican Hospital.
When: Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 7:00 p.m.. For more information, please cal The Bennett and Suzy Katz Cancer Resource Center at Dominican Hospital (831) 462-7770
Cancer Survivors and their caregivers are invited
Cake, coffee and other refreshments to be provided for all Survivors and their caregivers.
Please RSVP to Amy Allen at scsurvivorchair@yahoo.com or 831.239.9508
By Darragh Worland, April 30, 2010 - For the first time ever, a treatment that uses the body's own immunity to fight cancer cells has been proven to work. Finding a cancer vaccine is the Holy Grail of oncology, but has remained largely an unrealized dream — until now. This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a drug that actually trains the body's immune system to fight off advanced prostate cancer.
That's a big deal. Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men (after lung cancer,) according to the American Cancer Society, and about one in six men will be diagnosed with it during his lifetime.
The drug, called Provenge, is the first drug to be developed by the Dendreon Corporation, which was founded in 1992 by a pair of Stanford professors. Provenge is not exactly a new drug. In fact, according to The New York Times, three years ago it failed to meet the FDA's standards for approval.
But while the drug's unique capabilities are a huge step forward, it's hardly a panacea. In clinical trials, the treatment only extended the lives of patients about four months compared with a placebo. After three years, 32 percent treated with Provenge were alive, compared with 23 percent of those who got the placebo.
"The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle and proof that immunotherapy works in general in cancer, which I think is a huge observation," Dr. Philip Kantoff, chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the lead investigator in Dendreon’s largest clinical trial for the drug told the Times.
Provenge is not a preventive vaccine like those for the measles, hepatitis or the newer vaccine developed to block the virus that can lead to cervical cancer. It's a therapeutic vaccine, used only after prostate cancer has already developed and approved by the FDA specifically for more advanced stages.
The way the drug works is a marvel of modern science: first, the patient's white blood cells are extracted from their blood, the same way they would be during blood donation, and certain immune cells are separated out. Those cells are then injected with a combination of a protein often found on prostate tumors and an immune booster. The treated cells are then re-introduced to the patient's blood supply three times over the course of a month. The main side effects of Provenge in clinical trials were fever, chills, fatigue and pain.
Typically, men with prostate cancer have to undergo surgery to remove the prostate gland (which can have undesirable side effects, such as difficulty achieving erection) along with radiation and/or chemotherapy, both of which have a host of uncomfortable side effects, followed by treatment with drugs that reduce the levels of testosterone (which contributes to tumor growth.)
According to the Times, Dendreon hopes to develop other similar cancer vaccines, including one for bladder cancer. In fact, treatment vaccines could be the wave of the future in the world of oncology: dozens of other vaccines are in development with other companies.
Source: http://www.tonic.com/article/fda-approves-vaccine-treatment-for-prostate-cancer
April 23, 2010 - For a long time now doctors have known that prostate cancer "runs in the family". Men with family members who have been diagnosed with the disease have an elevated risk of developing cancer of the prostate. But exactly how high is an individual person's risk? For whom and at what age should an early detection screening urgently be recommended?
German researchers of the department headed by Kari Hemminki at DKFZ have analyzed these questions in the largest study ever published on familial prostate cancer. The study included 26,651 prostate cancer patients, 5,623 of whom came from families in which the disease had been diagnosed before.
The more of a man's direct relatives, i.e. brothers and fathers, are affected, the higher is his personal risk to develop prostate cancer himself. Thus, the researchers calculated that men up to an age of 65 years with three affected brothers have a risk that is 23 times higher than that of the control group (men without affected family members). Men aged between 65 and 74 years, whose father was or is the only one affected, have a risk that is increased by 1.8 times and, thus, the lowest risk elevation in the familial cancer group. The DKFZ researchers recognized a general tendency that the personal risk is the higher, the younger affected relatives were at the time of diagnosis.
Elevated familial cancer risks are often doubted. Critics argue that results tend to be distorted because relatives of affected persons are alarmed and have early detection exams more often than the rest of the population. For this reason, the argument runs, they are more frequently overdiagnosed, because even tumors are found that might never have caused any symptoms during their lifetime. In order to refute this criticism, the DKFZ researchers also investigated the prostate cancer mortality in relation to the number of affected family members. They arrived at the same risk distribution as for newly diagnosed cases: The more direct relatives are affected, the higher is a person's risk of dying from prostate cancer. Thus, the scientists have proved that the risk increase is real and not just due to more frequent early detection examinations.
"Our results provide a good guidance for doctors. If a man has several affected relatives who may even have been diagnosed at a young age, then his personal risk is substantially increased. In this case, a family doctor should urgently recommend having an early detection examination," said study head Kari Hemminki.
The study is based on data of the Swedish National Family Cancer Database which contains data on 11.8 million individuals and every single one of over one million cancer cases that occurred between the years of 1958 and 2006. Since the cancer database is linked with a multiple-generation register, it is possible to track cancer cases among parents and siblings of patients. Source: European Urology 2010, DOI:10.1016/j.eururo.2010.02.002
(PhysOrg.com) May 25, 2010-- Recent studies support the idea that the standard methods of screening men for prostate cancer leave much to be desired, particularly in terms of their inability to have much effect on prostate cancer survival. Now, a team of investigators at the University of Missouri School of Medicine have created a targeted gold nanoparticle that appears to offer a more sensitive and accurate method for detecting early stage prostate cancer. These nanoparticles may also be useful for detecting lung and breast cancers, too.
The investigators, led by Raghuraman Kannan and Kattesh Katti, published the results of their studies in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Katti is the principal investigator of a National Cancer Institute Cancer Nanotechnology Platform Partnership.
Drs. Kannan and Katti and their colleagues created their potential imaging agent by coating gold nanoparticles with bombesin, also known as Gastrin Release Peptide (GRP), a naturally occurring molecule that binds to a specific receptor that is abundant on prostate, breast, and small cell lung cancer cells. To do so, they had to develop new synthetic methods for linking this peptide, as well as other related peptides, to the gold nanoparticles.
With the nanoparticles in hand, the research team used them to image prostate tumors growing in mice. These experiments demonstrated that the nanoparticles were very specific at binding to prostate tumors and that this binding enabled the tumors to be spotted easily using computed tomography x-ray imaging. Moreover, tumors took up approximately 10 times more of the targeted nanoparticles than bombesin linked directly to the radioactive element technetium, a construct now in clinical trials as an imaging agent. These experiments also showed that injecting the nanoparticles into the peritoneal cavity produced better results than when the nanoparticles were injected directly into the blood stream, in large part because fewer nanoparticles became trapped in the liver and spleen.
This work, which is detailed in a paper titled, "Bombesin functionalized gold nanoparticles show in vitro and in vivo cancer receptor specificity," was supported in part by the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a comprehensive initiative designed to accelerate the application of nanotechnology to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer. An abstract of this paper is available at the journal's Web site. Provided by National Cancer Institute. Source: Source: http://www.physorg.com/news193983763.html
By Dr. Charles E. Myers Jr.
Health Science Institute recently came across some information from Dr. Charles Myers Jr., a US HSI Panelist and medical oncologist. We asked him to write the article below about prostate cancer and flaxseed. Over the past few years, you may recall the controversy over this topic. We thought it would help clarify the issue if an expert in the field gave us his opinion.
I've seen it happen in my own practice. Prostate cancer patients who were doing just fine suddenly get worse much worse. Then I discover they've started taking some kind of supplement that they weren't taking before they were diagnosed. It was too big a coincidence not to look into further. What I found is crucial, even life-saving, information that you wont find on the labels of the supplements you buy in your local health food stores. But its information that you need to know, nonetheless.
I know hearing that flaxseed may be dangerous seems to contradict everything natural medicine stands for. After all, dietitians and alternative health practitioners commonly recommend omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil to their patients to help lower blood pressure, decrease cholesterol, and relieve the inflammation of rheumatoid arthritis. But flaxseed, just like any substance natural or not isn't for everyone.
Nine published studies have analyzed the impact of alpha linolenic acid (ALA) one of the very substances in flaxseed that is thought to be healthful for most people and have found that it can increase your risk of developing prostate cancer or speed the progression of an existing condition (Refs. 1-9). (There is no evidence, however, that ALA increases the risks or growth rates of other cancers.)
Flaxseed is also not the only source you get ALA from. In an analysis of several hundred cases of prostate cancer among 51,000 men, Edward Giovannucci, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, found that men who ate large amounts of meat and animal fat, high in ALA, were 80 per cent more likely to die from prostate cancer than those who ate meat sparingly (Ref. 10). Also at risk were men who ate large amounts of mayonnaise, creamy salad dressings and butter.
In a follow-up article, Giovannucci explained that men consuming meat five times a week were two to three times more likely to develop invasive prostate cancer than those who ate meat only once per week (Ref. 11).
I've done some laboratory research of my own, and I found that ALA more than doubled the growth rate of human prostate cancers. In fact, it was a greater stimulus than testosterone.
So, after looking at all the evidence stacked against flaxseed oil, I strongly recommend that men with prostate cancer shouldn't use it (or other oils rich in ALA). It also appears that men should limit their meat and fat intake to only a few times a week to restrict their ALA consumption through dietary fat.
But this creates a problem. While you don't need ALA, you do need omega-3 fatty acids they're essential for maintaining optimum health. If you cant use flaxseed oil or ALA, you need to obtain these essential fatty acids from other sources. Safe, effective sources, that is. The omega-3 fatty acid we really need is DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and, to a lesser extent, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid). DHA is essential for the normal development and functioning of the human brain and the retina. And both DHA and EPA can help protect you from cardiovascular disease and suppress inflammation in diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. By far, the best sources of these omega-3s are cold-water fish like salmon, herring, and sardines. Why are cold-water fish so rich in EPA and DHA? Well, these particular fatty acids act as natural anti-freezes, and land or ocean plants that grow in cold environments (such as algae) must make large amounts of EPA and DHA to function. The fish that feed on these plants store EPA and DHA in their flesh, body fat and liver oils. But make sure you buy fish harvested from the ocean, not farm-raised fish. Farmers usually feed their fish corn, soy, and other grains and legumes, not DHA-rich plants like algae. Consequently, their fat doesn't have adequate DHA and EPA levels.
Charles Myers, M.D. is a medical oncologist and the former Director of the Cancer Center at the University of Virginia in the US. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of The Prostate Forum and founder of the American Institute for Disease of the Prostate. For more information about his clinic and publications, call (800)305-2432. References:
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Below are online resources for learning about your prostate cancer. "Prostate Cancer Websites" includes some of the more popular locations for newly diagnosed patients to do research, with links to more specialized sites where patients may go to get answers and do their “homework”. NOTE: The resources listed here are not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult qualified medical resources before making any treatment decision.
The Santa Cruz County Prostate Cancer Support Group maintains quite a few up to date books and videos about prostate cancer, prevention, diagnosis and treatment options for anyone interested in doing research or needs information about this disease. The library is located at the Katz Cancer Resource Center Dominican Hospital Education Building 1555 Soquel Drive, Santa Cruz, CA Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday or by Appointment (831) 462 7770.
Our support group has ongoing operating expenses beyond what our sponsors can provide. We do not have dues, but hope members will consider making any size donation to help us. Donations are welcome to assist us in maintaining and expanding our programs within the local community including the costs to run our website. The funds also help in keeping our library up to date with up to date books and literature regarding the treatment of prostate cancer, managing side affects, active surveillance, as well as information on nutrition, diet and lifestyle. Please make checks payable to "Santa Cruz County Prostate Cancer Support Group" and mail to:
Santa Cruz County Prostate Cancer Support Group
C/O Howard Waage
63 Asta Drive
La Selva Beach, CA 95076
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The Santa Cruz County Prostate Cancer Support Group does not endorse any provider, organization, product or individual. All medical decisions should be made with the advice and consultation of medical professionals.
Many THANKS to the American Cancer Society for assisting with the printing and mailing of this newsletter and the Katz Cancer Resource Center for allowing us to use their facility.