Breast-cancer diagnosing app developed by 17 y/o

[BDBoop]

Girl Programs Artificial 'Brain' to Diagnose Breast Cancer | LiveScience

A high school junior has created a computer brain that can diagnose breast cancer with 99 percent sensitivity. Seventeen-year-old Brittany Wenger of Sarasota, Fla., wrote a breast cancer-diagnosing app based on an artificial neural network, basically a computer program whose structure is inspired by the way brain cells connect with one another. She won grand prize at the Google Science Fair for her invention in ceremony held in Palo Alto, Calif. last night (July 23).

Wow!!

 

[waltky]

New targeted drug for breast cancer...

FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug
Feb 22,`13: WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison. Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy. "This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients - there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer." Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute. The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year. Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda. Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs. FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women. Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales. Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

Source

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd's g/f's better get demselves checked out, `cause dey's manly womens...

Male sex hormones 'drive breast cancer'
10 April 2013 - US scientists say they have found a new target to beat breast cancer - male sex hormones, or androgens.

The University of Colorado team discovered that many breast cancers possess androgen receptors on their surface, and that male hormones like testosterone fuel the tumour's growth. Drugs to block these receptors could offer another way to fight the disease, a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research heard. They plan clinical trials to test this. Dr Jennifer Richer and colleagues say more than three-quarters of all breast cancers possess androgen receptors and therefore might benefit from anti-androgen therapy. This type of treatment is already used for prostate cancer.

Hormones

Experts already know that some breast cancers grow under the influence of female hormones, like oestrogen and progesterone. The widely-used breast cancer drug Tamoxifen works by blocking oestrogen receptors to halt these cancers. Dr Richer's research suggests male hormones are also important drivers. They found many breast tumours possessed both oestrogen and androgen receptors. These responded to anti-androgen therapy in the laboratory. Patients who who relapse while on Tamoxifen but who also have androgen receptors might have the most to gain from this new type of treatment, according to Dr Richer. She said: "We are excited to move towards clinical trials of anti-androgen therapies in breast cancer."

Dr Emma Smith of Cancer Research UK said: "It's still early days for this research but there's growing interest in the androgen receptor's role in breast cancer as a potential new route to tackle the disease. "Cancer Research UK scientists are among those working on whether targeting this receptor could help treat both those women who develop resistance to other treatments and those who have fewer treatment options."

More BBC News - Male sex hormones 'drive breast cancer'

 

[waltky]

Height raises cancer risk for women...

Study Finds Link Between Women's Height, Cancer Risk
July 25, 2013 > Women's chances of developing cancer after menopause increase with their height, according to a new study.

Among nearly 145,000 women between the ages of 50 and 79, researchers found that height was more strongly associated with cancer than such established risk factors as obesity. The association held true for everything from thyroid cancer to melanoma, researchers reported in the latest issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

It's not height itself that's the risk factor, though. The authors of the new study say height “should be thought of as a marker for one or more exposures that influence cancer risk, rather than a risk factor itself.” “There's an intriguing indication that things going on in early life appear to feed into a process that may increase the risk for various cancers,” said Geoffrey Kabat, lead author of the study and a senior epidemiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York.

Those things might include diet as well as hormones in the body that contribute to normal growth, although researchers aren't sure yet. Cancer involves the uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in processes having to do with growth, so it follows that hormones or other growth factors that influence height may also influence cancer risk, Kabat said in a telephone interview with Reuters.

Dr. Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said the study should not raise alarm for the tall, though it does provide additional evidence that greater height is associated with cancer. “The increase in risk is modest and is balanced by a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in taller people, so there is no reason for those of us who are tall to panic,” Willett, who was not involved in the study, said in an email. “Most importantly, research to understand the reason for the extra risk in taller people may lead us to new ways to prevent or treat cancer.”

Isolating the link to height

See also:

Study: Combination Therapy Could Revolutionize Cancer Treatment
July 26, 2013 > Researchers say targeted therapies similar to ones used to treat HIV-infected patients could lead to finding a cure for cancer

One of the researchers who two decades ago put forward the idea of using drug cocktails to treat people infected with the virus that causes AIDS has concluded that combination therapies could cure cancer. Martin Nowak, Harvard University professor of mathematics and biology, who is also director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and co-author Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, published their findings in eLife Journal on Thursday.

Nowak was among researchers who analyzed data on how quickly the AIDS virus mutates against a single drug, a mid-1990s breakthrough that allowed scientists to drive the AIDS virus to virtually undetectable levels in HIV-infected patients by using a combination of antiretroviral drugs — drug cocktails that could turn a lethal disease into a manageable one. "These calculations led the medical community very quickly to adopt the combination treatment," he said. "And so in some sense, I want to achieve the same for the cancer community."

Lab officer cuts DNA fragment under UV light from an agarose gel for DNA sequencing as part of research to determine genetic mutation in a blood cancer patient

Today many cancer patients are treated with targeted therapy, drugs that inhibit specific genetic mutations that give rise to the growth and spread of tumors. But some cancers often return, according to Nowak, because they develop resistance to a drug that is trained on a single abnormal gene. Resistance to more than one drug can also occur, he adds, if they both target the same genetic mutation or if different therapies are used one after the other, giving the cancer time to develop resistance to both drugs.

To figure out a way around the problem, Nowak and colleagues created a computer model, inputting data from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on patients who had died from melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. They also used information on patients from Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Maryland, predicting patients’ response to multiple-drug therapies.
The results showed that the virtual patients, with a variety of cancers, could potentially be cured using two drugs that target different genetic mutations simultaneously.

That gives Nowak hope for the future of cancer treatment and outcomes. "I’m sure in a few years you will have many success stories when this will gradually lead to a situation where most cancers will be contained in the way that many bacterial infections are treated with antibiotics." A number of pharmaceutical companies around the world are actively pursuing combination therapies that Nowak hopes will revolutionize the treatment of cancer in much the same way that antiretroviral drugs tamed HIV.

Source

 

[Gracie]

Interesting.

And...I miss BDBoop.