Onco Actu du 14 avril 2015

	3. Prévention
‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ ignores a big piece of the story [The Boston Globe] The continued and necessary focus on improving the treatment of cancer, and the dazzling science behind this, should not blind us to the potential for cancer prevention, or distract us from the scaling up of relatively simple early detection solutions that have been available for decades.
	4. Dépistage, diagnostic et pronostic
£5m stratified medicine programme launched to personalise care for bowel cancer patients [Cancer Research UK] The £5M S-CORT* Consortium will use the latest genome-based technology to uncover the complex biology of bowel cancer in samples collected from over 2,000 patients from large clinical trials.
Breath test 'could give clues to stomach cancer risk' [BBC News] Scientists say more work is needed before it is ready to use in clinics.
Hard Cases: Quantifying Tests, Instead of Good Care [NY Times] Dr. Welch points out that doctors get to become doctors because they are good with tests, and know instinctively how to behave in a test-focused universe. Rate them by how many tests they order, and they will order in profusion, often more than the guidelines suggest.
	4.1 Dép., diag. & prono. - Prostate
How dogs could sniff out prostate cancer [NHS Choices] It seems unlikely that dogs would ever be routinely used on a widespread basis to detect prostate cancer. However, if researchers can identify the exact chemical(s) the dogs are detecting in urine, they could try to develop methods of detecting these chemicals.
	4.12 Biopsies liquides
Using the seeds of cancer to guide treatment strategies [The Institute of Cancer Research] Professor de Bono’s work could ultimately lead to doctors measuring the levels and molecular characteristics of circulating tumour cells at multiple time points along a patient’s cancer journey.
	4.7 Dép., diag. & prono. - Col de l'utérus
Smartphone holograms can diagnose cervical cancer [New Scientist] While people in low-income countries might benefit the most from smartphone diagnosis, future iterations of the device that detect diffraction patterns in a spot of blood from a pricked finger could enable people to diagnose themselves at home.
	5. Traitements
Recruiting the entire immune system to attack cancer [MIT News] Until now, most researchers have focused on one of two strategies: attacking tumors with antibodies, which activate the innate immune system, or stimulating T cells, which form the backbone of the adaptive immune system. By combining these approaches, the MIT team was able to halt the growth of a very aggressive form of melanoma in mice.
New Way to Fight Cancer [Harvard Medical School] Their surprising discovery demonstrates that the vitamin A derivative ATRA (all-trans retinoic acid), a treatment for APL that is considered to be the first example of modern targeted cancer therapy, can block multiple cancer-driving pathways and, at the same time, eliminate cancer stem cells by degrading the Pin1 enzyme.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Opens Pediatric CAR T Cell Clinical Trial [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center] The goal of this trial is to test the safety of modified T cells for patients whose leukemia has returned to the bone marrow following standard chemotherapy and/or bone marrow transplant.
Science Snaps: exposing melanoma’s ‘safe haven’ to help tackle drug resistance [Cancer Research UK] Understanding the ways in which melanoma cells develop this resistance is a big challenge. But researchers from across the globe are piecing together this complex picture, uncovering an array of cellular escape routes and proposing ways to block them.
Melanoma’s ‘safe haven’ targeted for shut-down [Cancer Research UK] It’s clear that the ‘safe haven’ offered by the surrounding cells is triggered as a response to the same drugs that target this class of melanoma.
Scientists visualize potential brain cancer treatments in real time [Virginia Tech] The research team separated the hard-to-kill stem cells from the general glioblastoma population by attracting the stem cells to a microchip coated with antibodies. The scientists then used a specially designed microfluidic chamber to trap the cells in a liquid environment.
	5.2 Pharma
Roche aims for 11 immunotherapy cancer drugs in late-stage trials this year [Reuters] The Basel-based company's MPDL3280A, which is being tested in melanoma, as well as lung, bladder, kidney, bowel and blood cancers but has not yet been approved to treat any type of cancer, is the furthest developed of this class of drug.
	5.2.1 Pharma - Partenariats
Cancer Research Technology and Medivir to develop new class of cancer drugs [Pharmafile] The collaboration will see the companies conducting a two-year research programme into small molecules targeting the protein ADAM8, which has been linked to tumour survival, cell invasion and metastasis.
AstraZeneca and PatientsLikeMe announce global research collaboration [AstraZeneca] “Understanding what patients are experiencing every day and how they define the value of their treatments are fundamental to our ability to push the boundaries of science in developing the next-generation of medicines".
	5.2.2 Pharma - Fusions & Acquisitions
Roche snags a genomics startup with an eye on cancer R&D [FierceBiotech] The company, CAPP Medical, has developed a screening technology that trawls blood for circulating tumor DNA, isolating and quantifying the genetic material to make inferences about a patient's cancer.
	5.4 Traitements - Economie
U.S. prescription drug spending rose 13 percent in 2014: IMS report [Reuters] Gilead reported a record-breaking $10.3 billion in first-year sales of Sovaldi as the $1,000-a-pill drug became the poster child for intense criticism of the high cost of new medicines.
	5.9 AACR
AstraZeneca to showcase strong oncology science at American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2015 [AstraZeneca] Data show activity of investigational compounds targeting key molecular pathways and activities including OX40, CD73, PI3K, AKT, mTOR, EGFR, SERD and PARP.
	6.1 Observation
The New Health Care: Why Survival Rate Is Not the Best Way to Judge Cancer Spending [NY Times] For many cancers, we’ve been diagnosing significantly more cases, but making little headway in mortality rates.
	6.10 Politiques
Knocking at the door of the global agenda setters [Cancer World] The World Oncology Forum is challenging global policy makers to face the reality that current approaches to controlling cancer are not fit for purpose. An invitation to Davos shows they may be listening, but do they yet understand the need for change?
	6.11 Patients
The public wants easier ways to participate in medical research, study shows [Scope Blog] As a next step, the bioethicists will be developing media-rich tools to explain the risks and benefits of research that uses electronic medical records and stored biological samples.
Women are not always to blame for delayed breast cancer diagnosis [The Guardian] I think people should stop making women feel bad about “delaying” seeing their doctor, when the equally worrying delays are those they encounter within the NHS.
	6.4 Médico-éco
UK funding for stroke and dementia research still too low, study says [The Guardian] The study also suggests the high level of research funding by cancer charities compared with those for other diseases can be partly explained by the public’s preferences, and even a form of ageism – a view that dementia and stroke are inevitably linked with ageing.
Dementia research gets 13 times less funding than cancer, figures show [The Telegraph] Treating and caring for cancer patients currently costs Britain around £5 billion a year, but the bill for dementia is £11 billion.
	6.7 DMP, Big Data & applis
IBM Creates Watson Health to Analyze Medical Data [NY Times] The IBM plan, put simply, is that its Watson technology will be a cloud-based service that taps vast stores of health data and delivers tailored insights to hospitals, physicians, insurers, researchers and potentially even individual patients.
Doctors’ Knowledge and Help is Now Just a Tap Away with New HealthTap App for Apple Watch [HealthTap Blog] The groundbreaking HealthTap App for Apple Watch lets you stay in touch with doctors’ answers, tips, and reminders, from a network of more than 68,000 top U.S. doctors, on the go.
IBM Announces Deals With Apple, Johnson And Johnson, And Medtronic In Bid To Transform Health Care [Forbes] Apple will work to integrate Watson-based apps into its HealthKit and ResearchKit tool systems for developers, which allow the collection of personal health data and the use of such data in clinical trials.