http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=2a47d0763e9bbee858a566e6ca66f72a Cancer GRACE :: Combined Feed SimplePie 1.1.1 http://cancergrace.org/general/2008/07/24/new-faculty/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:45:16 PDT Dr. West I’m pleased to announce that several new expert faculty members are joining the ranks here, in addition to myself and Dr. Laskin, who has been helping out here for several months. The whole idea was not to have me monopolize the conversation or pretend I alone had all of the answers. Instead, I wanted to get [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/22/rosetta-genomics-squamous-nsclc/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:31:18 PDT Dr. West Rosetta Genomics today issued a press release that described their new test that received regulatory approval in New York state as a method of discriminating whether a lung cancer is squamous or non-squamous cancer. Rosetta Genomics is based in Israel, and this particular test was developed in collaboration with researchers at Columbia University Medical [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/21/ctcs-for-lc-nejm/ Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:37:48 PDT Dr. West In a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a research group from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston published some very promising results from their work showing that they can now detect circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from most patients with lung cancer and even detect EGFR mutations and other molecular findings from [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/19/gene-sig-skrzypski/ Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:23:42 PDT Dr. West Continuing on the subject from my last post of gene signatures to predict clinical behavior, another ASCO presentation came from Poland (abstract here), with the goal of validating a couple of different kinds of gene signatures that have been presented before. One, from a group in Taiwan, was with just 5 genes and had [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/17/br10-gene-sig/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:11:25 PDT Dr. West I had described earlier this week (prior post here) how the long-term follow up of one of the more important adjuvant chemotherapy trials for early stage resected NSCLC patients showed that there may be long-term adverse effects of chemotherapy. My last post also suggested that the benefit of pre-operative chemotherapy in another trial appeared [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/15/s9900-summary/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 6:29:09 PDT Dr. West In my last post I described the results of the ChEST trial that showed a borderline statistically significant improvement in survival of patients who received cisplatin/gemcitabine chemotherapy for stage IB to IIIA NSCLC prior to surgery. This study was very similar to another neoadjuvant chemotherapy trial, known as SWOG 9900, which also randomized patients [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/13/chest-trial-neo-vs-adj-ct/ Sun, 13 Jul 2008 9:08:26 PDT Dr. West In contrast with post-operative chemotherapy, which has become a standard treatment approach to reduce the probability of recurrence of resected stage II and IIIA NSCLC (still pretty controversial for stage IB), pre-operative chemotherapy (also known as neoadjuvant, or induction chemotherapy) is less well studied and isn’t a typical approach. However, a recent study called ChEST, the [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/11/ialt-long-term-risk-adj-ct/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:07:00 PDT Dr. West Over the past few years, the role of post-operative, also known as adjuvant, chemo has become increasingly accepted as a standard of care. Several trials have shown an improvement in survival at about 5 years that is in the 5-15% range for recipients of chemo. However, the evidence indicates that the people at higher [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/09/sclc-wpl-eff-and-rt-benefit/ Wed, 9 Jul 2008 23:32:31 PDT Dr. West In my earliest introductory post about SCLC, I described the typical staging breakdown used clinically, which is essentially divided into limited disease SCLC (LD-SCLC), which is typically treated with chemo and chest radiation together, with curative intent, and extensive disease SCLC (ED-SCLC), which is typically treated with chemo alone and is not considered conventionally curable. But [...] http://cancergrace.org/lung/2008/07/07/cetux-rt-in-ps2-nsclc/ Mon, 7 Jul 2008 19:57:29 PDT Dr. West One of the core ideas in the management of stage III, or locally advanced, NSCLC is that unresectable disease that is being treated with curative intent is most effectively treated with a combination of concurrent systemic (”whole body”) therapy and chest radiation to all of the visible cancer. The systemic therapy, which has been [...]