Those of us following cancer news wait with baited breath for news of cures and treatments with promising results. So it's always a bit of a disappointment when it's bad news, like this: New Zealand researches and determined that the clinical trails on an Ovarian Cancer Drug called DMXAA have not demonstrated any positive results.

The premise behind the drug was that it could kill cancer by reducing the blood supply to tumors, and it was given to Ovarian Cancer patients, along with Chemotherapy, to see if it would make a difference in recovery. Unfortunately, it didn't, and research on Ovarian cancer will be put on the backburner to make way for Lung Cancer trials at Novartis in New Zealand.

There's good news for prostate cancer patients who've had the disease spread to other parts of the body -- a new treatments, currently being tried out on hundreds of patients with promising results. The drug is called GVAX and it's referred to as a vaccine, although it doesn't work like most vaccines in the sense that it is administered after diagnosis and progression of the disease. According to this news story, GVAX works by adding prostate cancer cells to the body, but these new cells are unable to replicate.

Several members of my family have battled prostate cancer to varying degrees of success, and I know that it's really widespread. So this is great news, and I hope GVAX is the miracle the prostate cancer is looking for.

By the way, if you have prostate cancer, they're recruiting patients for their clinical trials.

One of the keys to finding a cure for cancer is to understand how cancer grows and spreads within the body. Angiogenesis is our body's ability to form new blood vessels. This is important and needed for the body to help heal wounds and is also a part of a woman's menstruation each month. Its function in our bodies is a positive thing most of the time.

Angiogenesis also has a role in how cancer cells grow to become tumors. Cancer cells need a blood supply to live and grow. The cancerous tumor actually develops its own blood supply by sending messages to nearby blood vessels. These vessels then have the ability to grow toward the tumor. The tumor then has its own blood vessels to thrive, survive and grow.

This was not taken seriously back in 1961 when Dr. Judith Folkman came up with the theory of angiogenesis. He felt strongly that tumors could not grow bigger than a head of a pin without blood supply. He thought that an entirely new way to treat cancer would be to block this blood vessel growth to the tumor. Decades of work has proven this theory to be correct. What changed a lot of people's minds was an experiment that was done at the end of the 1970's at Dr. Folkman's lab. Tumor cells were put into a rabbit's eye, a place in the eye where there are no blood vessels. Blood vessels did grow toward and into the eye where the cancerous cells lived.

Tookad, a light-activated drug, has been shown to shrink prostate tumors by 84 percent, and in 46 per cent of the cases -- the cancer was gone. The photodynamic therapy is based on an anti-cancer drug that becomes toxic when exposed to light. The drug is injected into the blood stream and once it reaches its target, doctors shine a light on the tumor using catheter-inserted optical fibers. The drug destroys the illuminated blood vessels, choking the blood supply and starving the cancer of nutrients without damaging surrounding healthy tissue.

The vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy was developed by Avigdor Scherz and Yoram Solomon, biochemists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Scherz explained that the process in photosynthesis of chlorophyll, which results in a plant being green, is the same process in how the anti-cancer drug works. Tookad is a Hebrew word suggesting the warmth of light.  Researchers believe if Tookad continues to show promise in clinical trials, it could be an effective way to treat cancerous tumors without the need for surgery. They are currently seeking prostate cancer patients for phase-three clinical trials.

Art credit: Chlorophyll Fractal Art courtesy of Sven Geier

GlaxoSmithKline announced it has received positive data from an interim analysis of its Phase III trial of Tykerb in advanced breast cancer, and as such, ended enrollment for the trial after it found Tykerb in combination with Xeloda delayed the time to disease progression by more than 50 percent, compared to Xeloda alone.

None of the breast cancer patients in the trial had responded to Herceptin or other drugs.

“We are extremely encouraged by this data which suggest that Tykerb may offer significant benefit as an oral medication in combination with chemotherapy for patients with advanced or metastatic breast cancer, and whose disease has progressed on previous treatment regimens, including Herceptin,” said Paolo Paoletti, M.D., Senior Vice President of the Oncology Medicine Development Center at GlaxoSmithKline.

At this time, Tykerb is an experimental drug that does not have regulatory approval in any country for any use outside of clinical trials. GlaxoSmithKline plans to file marketing applications for Tykerb with the Food and Drug Administration and European regulators in the second half of the year.

A new study was conducted in how to tell cancer patients who take part in clinical trials, the results of the study. Taxotere as Adjuvant ChemoTherapy, TACT, researchers asked 1,400 UK patients involved in clinical trials if they wanted to know the results, and how they would like to be told about the results. It is not surprising to me that 98 percent of the participants said they wanted to know how the clinical trial they took part in turned out.

Stella Kyriakides, Co-Chair of EBCC-5 and past president of Europa Donna comments, "Some breast cancer patients take part in a clinical trial and are never told the results. It is important that patients are not forgotten after they have participated in a study that ultimately improves cancer treatment for all patients."

After a cancer patient agrees to help with a clinical trial, letting them know the results seems the fair thing to do. In the study, patients preferred to be told directly. Researchers felt that patients should be notified by the patient's hospital.

The Chronicle Herald has published Young Cancer Patients Unique, by health reporter, John Gillis, who highlights the need for special programs for teens and young adults diagnosed with cancer. In the column, he interviews Dr. Conrad Fernandez, an IWK Health Centre pediatric oncologist who states that teens and young adults with cancer are an orphaned group of patients whose distinct diseases and needs are not a focus of either child or adult cancer care programs.

According to Dr. Fernandez, the survival rate for people between 15 and 29 with cancer is lower than for children for a variety of complex reasons. Over half of children getting treatment for cancer are enrolled in clinical trials, but there are not as many opportunities for teens and young adults to be involved in research because they often fall outside the age cutoffs for both pediatric and adult trials. Dr. Fernandez said there has been a big push in the last five years to increase the accessibility to clinical trials for teens and young adults. The other reasons for lower survival rates for teens and young adults with cancer is discussed in Young Cancer Patients Unique.

The National Cancer Institute is funding two clinical trials to determine the effectiveness of using prolonged regulated doses of thermal heat, in combination with chemotherapy, as a treatment for cancer. The hypothesis behind thermal therapy hopes to prove that while heat is decreasing the pressure inside a tumor, more of the chemotherapy drugs can be absorbed into the tumor. In addition, by inducing a fever in the patient, the natural infection-fighting defenses of the body will stimulate the production of white blood cells. Patients currently enrolled in the two clinical trials are cancer patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, melanoma, inoperable or metastatic neuroendocrine tumors, and cancers of the gastric system, small bowel, lung, head and neck. Dr. Joan Bull, University of Texas Medical School at Houston oncology professor and Center for Thermal Therapy Cancer Treatment director, is leading the current trials.