Current issues in cancer diagnosis and treatment

Current issues highlight some of the latest research into cancer, new therapies becoming available and new drug treatments coming to the market.

if you are interested in current issues related to a specific type of cancer, go to one of the cancer information centres on this site and select Current Issues from there.

Axitinib gives new hope to thyroid cancer sufferers In patients with advanced thyroid cancer, radioactive iodine therapy can be very effective. However, there are some patients who fail to respond to this and the alternative options are limited. A...
Targeted therapy delivers toxin to glioblastoma cells Interleukin 13 receptor is overexpressed by glioblastoma cells but minimally by normal brain cells. Aiming to exploit this difference, workers from UCSF have coupled cintredekin besudotox to IL13 and...
Sorafenib gives new hope for patients with liver cancer At the recent 2007 American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, data were presented of a clinical trial in which patients with advanced primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma)...
Satraplatin retards the progression of hormone resistant, advanced prostate cancer In the last few years, there has been an increasing number of chemotherapy drugs that have shown usefulness in advancing prostate cancer (resistant to hormone therapies). Taxotere and mitozantrone...
Trial on neoadjuvant chemotherapy in bladder cancer An important trial of 'up-front' (neoadjuvant) chemotherapy was reported at this year's influential American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in San Francisco (May '01) by workers from a...
More rapid assays of Serum Thyroglobulin allow quicker ascertainment of Thyroglobulin level and the result of the Iodine-123 sca One of the problems in the management of the patient with thyroid cancer, who is being followed up by both radio-iodine tracer whole body scanning and serial thyroglobulin levels in the serum, is...
Thalidomide therapy in advanced thyroid cancer In a recent trial reported from Kentucky, thirteen out seventeen patients with differentiated (i.e papillary or follicular) thyroid cancer (76%) responded to thalidomide therapy. It is regarded that...
Testicular lymphoma and relapse sites Dr. M Ozsahin (Universitaire Vaudois, Switzerland) presesnted data on the follow-up of 37 patients with primary testicular lymphoma. This rare presentation of extranodal lymphoma tended to present...
Iodine-123 is a better imaging agent than iodine-131 in thyroid cancer Recent work has shown that the isotope I-123 is a better imaging agent than I-131 and mmost large thyroid cancer centres are moving over to this newer imaging agent for the scan detection of...
Heliobacter infection and the development of gastric cancer An epidemiological study from Japan has just been published (New Eng J Med 2001; 345: 784-9) strongly linking heliobacter infection with the development of stomach/gastric cancer. 1526 Japanese...
Hereditary stomach/gastric cancer Familial diffuse gastric cancer is an autosomally inherited disease that develops at a younger age than the much commoner sporadic form of this cancer. Germ line truncating mutations in the...
Topoisomerase 1 inhibitors may have activity in malignant gliomas Recently presented data from Duke University, North Carolina suggests that topoisomerase 1 inhibitors (specifically topotecan, irinotecan and 9-amino-camtothecin) have activity in in vitro glioma and...
ST1571 in gastrointestinal stromal tumours Gastrointestinal stromal tumours/sarcomas are characterised by the expression of c-kit proto-oncogene product (KIT) and tend to respond poorly to orthodox chemotherapy. ST1571, a signal transduction...
Iphosphamide, Carboplatin and Etoposide chemotherapy is excellent salvage chemotherapy in refractory or relapsed Ewing's and Rha This salvage chemotherapy regimen, devised for patients who had failed adriamycin (doxorubicin based chemotherapy) has been claimed to be the best supportive chemotherapy regimen around at present...
The use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy for soft tissue sarcomas The routine use of chemotherapy after surgery for soft tissue sarcopmas is not established therapy. In an attempt to use the chemotherapy mopre successfully, several trials have looked at the use of...
Localised limb osteosarcoma: results of a trial looking at two drug versus three drug adjuvant chemotherapy A European trial looking at a two drug adjuvant chemotherapy regimen (adriamycin and cis-platinum) versus the same drugs plus a third viz. methotrexate showed no advantage to adding the methotrexate...
PET scanning helps stage and tell the grade of sarcomas at presentation PET scanning, a new form of functional scanning, is good at telling not only whether the sarcoma has spread/metastasised, but also whether a sarcoma is of high grade (and hence likely to behave...
Pegylated Liposomal Doxorubicin in refractory sarcoma chemotherapy Doxorubicin is the best established chemotherapy agent in sarcoma therapy. The relatively newly liposomal formulation of the compound has been shown to have similar activity against the cancer but a...
High dose Melphalan and autologous transplantation in children with Rhabdomyosarcoma As soft tissue sarcoma in children is a proven indication for adjuvant chemotherapy, so, if there is any group for whom a strategy of high dose chemotherapy (above marrow death thus the need for an...
Who should receive adjuvant chemotherapy after definitive surgery for soft tissue sarcomas? The subject of who should receive post operative chemotherapy for localised soft tissue sarcoma has been a controversial one for over a decade. The subject has been overviewed at the 2000 American...

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