A German biotech company has announced positive results from a genetically engineered herpes virus that is designed to kill cancer cells. It not only kills the cancer cells but leaves healthy tissue unharmed. Results from clinical trials has showed promise.

Being injected with a virus might seem strange but researchers believe that viruses could one day become a valuable addition to conventional cancer treatments.

The results have shown in animal testing and limited human testing the ability to kill colorectal and liver cancer cells.

"People don't often understand how a tiny skin blemish can kill," wrote Sarah Toller in her July 2, 2006 blog entry. Yet it call kill. And it killed Sarah on Tuesday, June 12, 2007.

On June 10, I wrote about Sarah. I wrote about how melanoma was claiming this young woman, how her husband was writing the final chapters of his wife's life on the blog she began just more than one year ago.

I visited Sarah's blog yesterday and read a closing statement written by her beloved. It was simple, to the point, and terrifyingly sad.

WOW, what a book -- a perfect guide for those just embarking on a medical journey and a valuable resource for people like me -- already surviving a major illness -- who wish to better manage their health care for all of time.

Author Laura Nathanson, MD, wrote What You Don't Know Can Kill You: A Physician's Radical Guide to Conquering the Obstacles to Excellent Medical Care in honor of the husband she lost after a series of misdiagnoses and for everyone wishing to prevent such tragedy in their own lives.

Nathanson offers readers techniques for identifying signs of misdiagnosis and misleading analysis of symptoms. She shares tips for preventing medical miscommunication, keeping safe in the hospital, and choosing health care plans without falling into the uncovered services trap.

The allure of this book is the easy, non-medical approach Nathanson uses as she urges everyone facing the medical world to take charge of an often inpenetrable system. For the patient who is no stranger to this world, Nathanson's words will ring abundantly true.

"When I look back on that long period of delayed diagnosis and how we were then and later bounced around from one medical specialist to another, the image that pops into my head is that of a slightly mad, grotesque volleyball game -- with the patient as the ball," she writes.

For the patient new to medical confusion, Nathanson's words will impart volumes of truth.

"Here's what I've learned, and what you must learn if you wish yourself and your loved ones to survive a bout with serious illness," she reports. "No matter who you are, physician or not, lucky or not; no matter how rich, famous, successful, good-looking, innocent, kindly or powerful; no matter how close and trusting the relationship you have with those providing your medical care -- you cannot rely on today's medical system to keep you healthy, safe and alive."

Amen.

This is a big question for those in the field of cancer immunotherapy, treatment based upon the concept of adjusting the immune system to reject and destroy tumors.

The National Cancer Institute along with a company called NewLink Genetics are looking to get FDA approval to start clinical trials of a drug that restricts a natural mechanism for immune suppression.

This enzyme named IDO, has been shown to help the fetus avoid rejection by the mother's immune system. This discovery led scientists to suspect and later prove that tumors express IDO.

Will suppressing IDO in humans help the immune system to seek out and kill cancer cells? This is what these scientists want to find out.

Doctor Mellor, a pediatric oncologist, says "What (cancers) do, we think, is make a protective cocoon so the immune system does not attack the tumor, so that gives you the therapeutic opportunity. If you stop IDO from blocking the response, you should allow the response, so now the specificity of the immune system is brought to bear directly on tumor cells"

Interesting stuff!

When I told my husband that the use of cannabis is being linked to a five percent increase in lung cancer risk -- that's 15 new cases each year in New Zealand where a study was just conducted -- he seemed to think this risk is comparable to his dying from a grasshopper landing in his eye.

A scientist John is not, but his thoughts on the matter seem to parallel international thinking on the drug which goes something like this: the risk marijuana use has on cancer incidence is so very low it's hardly worthy of much worry.

A California study of more than 1600 people last year found no link between cancer and smoking the drug, despite researchers' prediction they would find some kind of connection.

New Zealand researchers have found a connection, though, and however small it may seem, they say it's significant.

They found the risk of developing lung cancer increased by about eight percent each year for people whose cumulative exposure equated to smoking one joint per day -- about the same as the increase for someone who smokes one pack of cigarettes per day. They also found the younger someone starting smoking cannabis, the greater the risk and that contributing risk factors include smokers' deeper inhalation and the tendency to hold smoke in their lungs.

Cannabis, the most commonly used recreational drug in the world with 161 million users, has been thought to have a protective effect against cancer due to its chemical THC, which appears to kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous. This study may prove otherwise.

This comment just arrived in response to yesterday's post Headed for melanoma, and it's just too raw and powerful to leave buried in the comment section of the site.

So here it is, word for word -- a chilling and empowering message from a 37-year-old mom of two living with a disease that is downright deadly.

I have melanoma. I was diagnosed last August and have had 6 surgeries in 6 months.

I have lost 4 members in my melanoma support group. I go to Jaime's funeral tomorrow afternoon. She was 29 years old. Heather was 37 when she died on March 2, 2007. The midwife noticed a suspicious mole on her leg during the birth of her 4th child. She died 23 months later. Jan was a mother of 5 ages 9 to 19, she passed away on February 8, 2007. Ceri was only 20 years old when melanoma claimed her life on January 14, 2007.

I always thought skin cancer had to be HUGE, ugly, and hard to ignore. I didn't know it could be small, have no symptoms, and KILL you.

Melanoma incidence is increasing faster than any other cancer. According to statistics found on the American Cancer Society's website (www.cancer.org), the prognosis for someone diagnosed with melanoma is worse, stage for stage, than someone with breast cancer.

Getting more than 3 blistering sunburns during childhood doubles your risk. Sunbed use increases ones risk. Having fair skin and light eyes also puts you at a higher than average risk, but having dark skin does not make you immune. Bob Marley died from Melanoma in 1981.

Everyone at higher risk should get screened by a dermatologist every year. And all of us should be checking our own skin each month.

Melanoma is a virulent and aggressive cancer. It begins in the melanocytes, or the pigment in the skin. It presents itself as a change in an existing mole or skin pigment, or in the formation of a new one. It is easily treated in its most early stages. Once it spreads, though, it is often fatal.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for melanoma. Melanoma is one of the cancers that won't respond to conventional chemotherapy. There have been no significant advances in the medical treatment or survival rate in the last 30 years.

More awareness is needed. Most think "it's only skin cancer" and consider it nothing serious. But I can tell you with absolute certainty, they are DEAD wrong.

Boise State basketball player Coby Karl, son of Denver Nuggets coach George Karl, had surgery 13 months ago to remove his thyroid after he was diagnosed with papillary carcinoma, a form of treatable cancer. And while Karl received chemotherapy to kill off any lingering cancer cells, he must undergo cancer surgery once again.

Karl, who plans to play in the NABC All-Star game in Atlanta on March 31, will return to Boise on April 2 for surgery to remove cancerous lymph nodes.

The lymph node cancer was identified in January, but Karl, 23, kept his condition private until his team lost to New Mexico State in the Western Athletic Conference tournament semifinals. This ended the Broncos' season. And now begins Karl's second go-round with cancer.

You may remember Karl as one of last year's NBA draft hopefuls. He worked out for three teams, including his dad's team, but eventually withdrew his name from the draft and returned to Boise State for his senior year.

Nearly 20 percent of women and eight percent of men with lung cancer have never smoked, say researchers involved in a study of one million people in the United States and Sweden. The likely culprit in these lung cancer cases is secondhand smoke.

It's not yet clear why women are more likely to develop the disease. Perhaps they are more susceptible to all forms of smoking -- whether direct or secondhand -- or maybe because more men smoke than women, women are more likely to be exposed to secondhand smoke.

While smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, there are other factors to blame for disease incidence. Radon, asbestos, chromium, and arsenic are all associated with lung cancer.

According to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer will be diagnosed in 213,000 Americans in 2007. The disease will kill 160,000.

Researchers have made a stem cell discovery that may help treat pancreatic cancer -- one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

University of Michigan scientists have found cancer stem cells in pancreatic tumors that appear to drive cell tumor growth and could lead to the development of drugs to target and kill these cells.

Pancreatic cancer kills 97 percent of people diagnosed with the disease within five years. Half of all diagnosed patients die within six months of diagnosis, and this cancer -- that spreads quickly and is rarely detected at an early state -- kills 33,000 each year in the United States alone. So any improvement in the study of this disease is a true gift.

"The clinical implications of this work are significant," said Dr. Diane Simeone, director of the Gastrointestinal Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre and lead author of the study, published in the journal Cancer Research.

"We've made baby steps in improving the survival in these patients -- on the order of a few months (longer to live) -- over the past decade or so. But we really haven't had a major breakthrough in coming up with something that has the potential to provide a cure," she said.

Simeone says killing these cancer stem cells is like pulling out the root of a weed. And she says the best way to pull out the root is to target these stem cells instead of the traditional approach of shrinking tumors by killing as many cells as possible -- an approach that may be flawed because cancer stem cells tend to resist standard therapies.

Canadian researchers have made an unexpected discovery in a molecule that appears to drastically boost the ability of standard drugs to kill breast cancer cells. Currently, the discovery has been confined to the lab -- but researchers hope the power of this molecule, the ANK peptide, can one day be used to counter drug resistance for many women with breast cancer.

Scientists from Queen's University say the ANK peptide, not a drug by itself, gives drugs like taxol and nocodazole more than triple the ability to kill breast cancer cells. One scientist says the process of enhancing drug effectiveness is much like adding flavor to coffee to make it taste better.

This is exciting news, but the results -- published Monday in the journal Cancer Research -- only apply to lab experiments at this point. Researchers must now proceed with testing the peptide-drug combination in lab mice. If successful, they will move on to human testing. The whole process could take years. But early results are so promising that application for a U.S. patent on the peptide has already been made.

According the medical experts, breast cancer patients can become resistant to some drugs depending on duration of treatment, dose of medication, and genetic makeup.

"This peptide would be able to give them another chance," said a researcher from this study. "For those who respond reasonably well, they will do even better; for those who don't respond to this drug treatment ... we greatly hope this will make the current drug more useful by extending its impact to a wider range of people, particularly those with a resistance problem."

In a radical new approach to attacking cancer, researchers will soon attempt to kill tumors by infecting them with viruses that cause ailments like the common cold.

This virus therapy treatment -- considered the third pillar alongside chemotherapy and radiation -- could one day become standard battle against cancer.

One Belfast doctor says anything that could improve the lives of cancer patients is worth a try. And try is exactly what Leonard Seymour, Professor of Gene Therapy at Oxford University, plans to do when he begins leading trials later this year.

Seymour, who has been working with viruses that kill cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue, will use a stealth virus masked from the body's immune system with a polymer coat that could travel through the bloodstream and reach tumors.

Two viruses are likely candidates for study in the first clinical trials -- adenovirus, cause of a cold-like virus, and vaccinia, cause of cowpox and a component in the smallpox vaccine.

Preliminary research on mice shows that virus therapy works well on tumors resistant to standard cancer drugs. But several years of trials will be necessary before the therapy can be considered for use on all cancers.

One or more extra or missing chromosomes can both fuel tumor growth and act to suppress tumor growth, according to University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine researchers.

Heralded as a discovery that solves a 100-year-old genetic puzzle because the hypothesis was first suggested by German biologist Theodor Bover that long ago, researchers sought to determine if the wrong number of chromosomes contributed to tumor growth, or was a consequences of damage in cancerous cells.

While studying aneuploidy -- which is what the occurrence of one or more extra or missing chromosomes is called -- in mouse models, the researchers found that the same genetic mechanism that promotes tumor growth can slow tumor growth.

"This study opens up a whole series of potential therapeutic targets for cancer," said Beth A.A. Weaver, of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and UCSD Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, the study's first author. "By increasing the level of genetic damage, we can kill tumor cells."

Hyperthermia therapy with radiation have been added to the 2007 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology for Breast Cancer as an approved treatment for recurrent breast cancer and other localized cancer recurrences.

According to an explanation by the BSD Medical Treat with Heat website, hyperthermia therapy uses heat, which has been shown to kill cancer cells, in the treatment of cancerous tumors. Hyperthermia therapy also appears to make radiation therapy more effective. "While it has been known for hundreds of years that fevers can kill cancer, only recently has technology been developed that can control and focus heat specifically on tumors. This technology is found in the BSD-500 Hyperthermia System."

The BSD-500 Hyperthermia System is already used in the treatment of skin cancers that are progressive or recurrent despite conventional therapy. To learn more about hyperthermia therapy, request a free information kit, learn treatment options, find a physician, or speak to a patient advisor, visit the Treat with Heat website.

I took my boys yesterday for a tour of the University of Florida's Department of Entomology and Nematology. Translation for these little boys -- ages five and three -- involves one simple word. Bugs. They love bugs, hunt for bugs, capture bugs, and reluctantly set them free because I coax them into allowing these itty bitty creatures to continue living with their "mommies and daddies." I have a soft spot for all living beings -- bugs included.

We learned some crazy facts about bugs yesterday -- insects is the proper term really. We learned there is one cockroach that can live for seven days without its head. We learned there are two types of Madagascar cockroaches living in a lab in the very same building we visited that if set free, would reproduce so quickly they would become a major pest problem in the state of Florida. And we learned that of all animals on this planet, most are insects. But not only did we learn some crazy facts, we -- well, Joey -- shared a crazy fact too.

Joey is five years old. He is the boy who remembers much of my breast cancer journey. He is the one who helped shave my head, the one who thought a banana would make my sick tummy feel better. He's the one who would blurt out to people we never knew very well, "My mommy is bald," the one who asked me just last night if the metal thing -- my port -- was still in my chest. When I told him it's gone, he jumped up and announced, "Yeah, it's gone!" Cancer is one of many vocabulary words housed in Joey's brain. And sometimes the word comes up unexpectedly, in strange contexts, in surprising ways. Like today.

Our bug tour guide told us that in Africa, mosquitoes transmit diseases that kill millions of people. But those with sickle cell anemia are immune to the deadly diseases due to their compromised red blood cells that somehow fend off disease. This fact prompted Joey to share with the guide, "Did you know when people have cancer, there are bugs that can kill the cancer?" Our guide listened to this crazy fact and said in a kid-friendly way, "No, I did not know that. Who told you that?" Joey told her, "I don't remember but someone told me."

I am not sure what prompted Joey to make this announcement. Perhaps he was trying to one-up the tour guide, to sound like an expert on one of his favorite subjects. Perhaps his imagination was in overdrive and he blurted out the best story he could offer. Perhaps he jumbled up a story he had heard on the topic of cancer. And perhaps he is just simply hopeful that one day, bugs will help cure cancer. And wouldn't that be nice -- a simple mosquito comes along, pierces the skin, and poof, cancer is gone.

My cancer journey would not be nearly as interesting, as enlightening, as tender if Joey was not along with me for the ride. He keeps me busy and keeps my spirits up. He keeps me grounded and keeps life simple. Best of all -- he keeps me laughing.

Kim Taylor is a 45-year-old single mother who lives in Suwannee County, Florida and is proud to have successfully raised one daughter -- a graduate of the University of Florida. Kim enjoys outdoor activities like camping as well as sewing, crafting, and carpentry projects. She is most at peace spending time with her family, working as a youth volunteer -- and raising awareness for breast cancer. It's a interest she acquired just two years ago, compliments of a personal encounter with the disease that has taught her to let the little things go, to appreciate every sunrise, to make every moment matter.