Many people know the name of the breast cancer drug Herceptin, also known as trastuzumab, most famous
for causing controversy over its availability in different parts of the UK. The treatment is a so-called “smart” or targeted therapy, designed to lock on to molecules on the surface of some breast cancers. Now researchers in Japan think that trastuzumab, and a similar drug called cetuximab, might also have a use for treating a different disease – cancer of the oesophagus.
“Smart” drugs get smarter
August 23, 2007
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Breast, Oesophagus, Scientific papers | 
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Posted by Kat Arney
Three days, in fruit
August 23, 2007Randomly, the media spotlight has focused on several fruit this week:
A presentation at the annual American Chemical Society conference in the States: Scientists played about with the chemical structure of certain fruit pigments, and found that they could be made to kill bowel cancer cells in a Petri dish even better than the unmodified chemicals. This got widespread media coverage (‘darker fruit could fight cancer’).
The main component of jam – pectin – is found to kill prostate cancer cells, but not normal cells, in the lab. This is quite an interesting result, as the difference between the two cell types was quite stark. One can only speculate about how this research came about – maybe the researchers had an accident with their breakfast in the tissue culture lab.
A compound purified from cranberries is found to re-sensitise ovarian cancer cells to platinum drugs in the laboratory. As drug resistance is quite a problem in ovarian cancer treatment, the pursuit of anything that could help overcome this is welcome. However, as with all these stories… it’s early days.
So, in summary – there’s nothing here to suggest any deviation from the tried and trusted ‘five-a-day’ message that the vast amount of large, population-based studies like EPIC supports. There’s certainly not a shred of evidence that anyone should start eating above-average quantities of these fruit. You could just say it was a case of the media going temporarily bananas…
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Cancer in the news, Diet, Health & Lifestyle | 
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Posted by Henry Scowcroft
Controversy over European cancer statistics
August 23, 2007
The publication of the flagship European report on cancer survival inevitably leads to the UK being described by the media as the ‘sick man of Europe’, and this week was no exception. The media almost universally portrayed the UK being ‘put to shame’ by the fact that we ‘lag behind’ many other European nations.
On the face of it, this seems justified. The report – a complicated mathematical model built out of figures collected many different ways in many different countries – does appear to show that the UK has a lower survival rate for some cancers. Read the rest of this entry »
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Cancer in the news, Screening, Statistics | 
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Posted by Henry Scowcroft
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