Articles

Empire Genomics, an emerging molecular diagnostics company focused on cancer diagnostics, has recently received approval from the New York State Department of Health for its diagnostic test facility.

A new collaborative initiative among Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has been established to create treatment pathways based on precision (or personalized) medicine for patients with advanced cancer and to try to accelerate the development of personalized therapies.

A simplified administration schedule of only 1 dose, instead of the current standard of 3 doses, of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine appears to be all women need to be protected from cervical cancer, according to new data from a study funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and recently published (Safaeian M, et al. Cancer Prev Res [Phila]. 2013;6:1242-1250).

Researchers led by Nobuhide Ueki, PhD, Assistant Research Profes­sor, Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, Stony Brook University, have found a new way to get targeted cancer drugs to selectively affect only the cancer cells of a patient and not the healthy cells that are also normally affected by the drug (and cause its toxicity), thereby removing many of the potential side effects of the drugs, which would of course greatly enhance the value of cancer drugs.

A few days after the first drug with a breakthrough therapy designation was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ibrutinib (Imbruvica; Pharmacyclics/Janssen Biotech)—the second drug with such a designation—received an accelerated FDA approval for the treatment of patients with mantle-cell lymphoma (MCL), a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). MCL represents approximately 6% of all cases of NHL in the United States.

Using its priority review pathway, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the monoclonal antibody obinutuzumab (Gazyva; Genentech) for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who have not previously received treatment for CLL. Obinutuzumab is approved to be used in combination with chlorambucil.

Survival is not cheap. In fact, according to the results of a new study, cancer survivors have ongoing annual medical expenditures averaging $17,000 per patient in the first year after diagnosis, or $6400 per patient at least 1 year postdiagnosis (Guy GP Jr, et al. J Clin Oncol. 2013;31:3749-3757).

Diagnosing lung cancer by swabbing a patient’s nose may be possible in the not-too-distant future. Changes in nasal gene expression in patients with lung cancer have been found to correlate with changes in gene expression in the bronchus, opening the door to the possibility of nasal gene expression as an early diagnostic biomarker of lung cancer, said Avrum Spira, MD, MSc, Director, Translational Bioinformatics Program, Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands—The more a European Union (EU) country spends on health, the fewer the cancer-related deaths occur in that country, and there is a great disparity between Western and Eastern EU countries, according to research presented at the 2013 European Cancer Congress.

San Diego, CA—Current economic trends mandate the development of innovative strategies to affect quality and efficiency in cancer care, applying the same rigor as used in clinical trials, according to Lee N. Newcomer, MD, MHA, Senior Vice President, UnitedHealthcare, who addressed cost issues and barriers in provider reimbursement at the 2013 ASCO Quality Care Symposium.