Onco Actu du 30 janvier 2017

	2.11 Etiologie - Alimentation
How burnt toast and roast potatoes became linked to cancer [The Guardian] A person would need to eat 75kg (165lbs) of chips every day for two years, for instance, to be getting the cumulative dose of acrylamide (200 mg/kg daily) used in one rat study that showed the compound could cause DNA damage when it latched on to haemoglobin in the blood.
	4.2 Dép., diag. & prono. - Génome
How breast cancer and the BRCA gene brought us the sister we never knew [The Guardian] Although she knows it wasn’t rational, and that she can’t possibly be held responsible for it, Tamsin says she felt the weight of responsibility of having to tell her sisters about the gene.
	5.10 Traitements - Essais
How Not to Do It: Dosing Volunteers [In the Pipeline] But you may not see just how far it’s going: instead of 300mg, each student got thirty grams. Yeah, I’d say that’s a sign of inexperience – no alarm bells went off when they weighed out a big fluffy white pile of the stuff? Or when they tried to dose it?
	5.12.2 Immunothérapies - CAR-T
Novartis Signals Growing Ambitions for CAR-T Cancer Treatments [Bloomberg] Swiss company says it doubled investment in manufacturing.
Engineered immune cell treatment for childhood leukaemia may be a step closer [Cancer Research UK] The technique isn’t yet perfected as one child developed a condition called graft-versus-host disease, where the transplanted cells attack the patient’s body. But this was resolved with other treatment.
	5.12.3 Immunothérapies-combinaisons
Paving the Way for Research on Combination Therapies [Cancer Research Catalyst] Of the nearly 1,500 clinical trials testing drug combinations launched in 2014 and 2015, 80 analyzed combinations of experimental drugs, but only nine of those trials tested drugs from different companies. The article highlights some burgeoning efforts to increase collaboration.
	5.14 ECCO
Breath test could help detect stomach and oesophageal cancers [ECCO] The trial was based on the results of previous research that suggested differences in the levels of specific chemicals (butyric, pentanoic and hexanoic acids, butanal, and decanal) between patients with stomach or oesophageal cancer and patients with upper gastrointestinal symptoms without cancer.
Diabetes or its rapid deterioration can be an early warning sign for pancreatic cancer [ECCO] "The study by Autier and colleagues opens up the possibility to combine the diagnosis of an associated disease, type 2 diabetes, with blood biomarkers. It is a step in the right direction if we can increase the proportion of early diagnosed pancreatic cancers.”
Some early stage breast cancer patients may benefit more from breast conserving therapy than from mastectomy [ECCO] The patients selected from the Netherlands Cancer Registry had no metastases (spread of the cancer to organs other than the lymph nodes close to the tumour). To obtain information on cause of death, data were linked to the cause of death register.
Experts predict melanoma death rates will fall by 2050, but numbers of deaths will increase unless effective treatments are developed [ECCO] Ms Koechlin, Prof Autier and colleagues used statistical models to work out whether current cancer death rates were due more to the effects of age, the year of birth (which takes into account exposure to cancer-causing agents such as sunshine during early life), or to the recent introduction of new medical technologies or treatments.
Breath test could save lives by diagnosing deadly cancers earlier [The Telegraph] The results, presented at the European Cancer Congress meeting in Amsterdam, showed that the test was both good at identifying those patients who had cancer, and unlikely to produce a false diagnosis. Over the next three years, the researchers plan to run a larger trial including patients not yet diagnosed with cancer.
The immunotherapy, pembrolizumab, is active against mucosal melanoma tumours and prolongs survival for patients with bladder cancer [ECCO] “At this stage we don’t know why some mucosal melanoma patients responded to pembrolizumab, while others did not. This is an important question and research is ongoing.”
Women treated for precursor of breast cancer can expect to live as long as other women [ECCO] The findings, presented at the Congress by Dr Lotte Elshof, showed that, although women with DCIS have a higher risk of dying from breast cancer, overall they have a slightly lower risk of dying from any cause. Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute say their results should provide reassurance to women who are diagnosed with the disease.
	5.2 Pharma
Big Drug Companies Should Secede From The Pharmaceutical Research And Manufacturers Of America [Forbes] Big drug companies have different issues and challenges from those of smaller companies.
	5.3.4 Traitements - AMM (FDA, EMA)
Celgene Receives Positive CHMP Opinion to Expand REVLIMID® (Lenalidomide) Indication as Monotherapy for the Maintenance Treatment of Patients with Newly Diagnosed Multiple Myeloma (MM) after Autologous Stem Cell Transplantation [Celgene] In the two phase III studies, REVLIMID® monotherapy as maintenance treatment post-ASCT significantly reduced the risk of disease progression or death in patients with MM, leading to the studies being unblinded based on passing their pre-specified boundary for superiority at interim analysis.
EMA Recommends Extension of Indications for Lenalidomide in Multiple Myeloma [ESMO] New indication concerns maintenance treatment of patients with newly diagnosed disease who have undergone autologous stem cell transplantation.
	5.4 Traitements - Economie
Drug firms ‘put lives of cancer patients at risk’ as out-of-patent prices are inflated [The Guardian] The biggest price rise in the UK that the team found was also for an Aspen drug. The cost of busulfan for chronic myeloid leukaemia to the NHS rose from 21p for 2mg in 2011 to £2.61 in 2016, an increase of 1,143%. Aspen’s share price rose more than 650% from 2009 to last year.
Europe faces steep price increases for some old cancer drugs [Reuters] European prices for some off-patent cancer drugs have risen by more than 100 percent in the past five years, with two cases of hikes exceeding 1,000 percent, according to data presented at a medical conference on Saturday.
	6. Lutte contre les cancers
Depression and Anxiety Tied to Cancer Deaths [NY Times] The study, in BMJ, is observational so cannot determine cause and effect, and it depended in part on self-reports. “The extent to which these associations could be causal,” the authors write, “requires further testing with alternative study designs.”
	6.10.1 Politiques (USA)
Top academics lash out at Trump’s ‘un-American’ immigration ban [STAT] On Friday evening, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s international scholars department advised students from the seven affected nations to postpone any international travel for fear they might not be able to return to the US.
As Trump worked on his immigration ban, Hillary Clinton showed her support for immigrant cancer researchers [STAT] One of the event’s beneficiaries was Dr. Azra Raza, who last summer wrote an opinion piece for STAT under the headline: “I’m an immigrant and a Muslim. And I’m here to cure cancer.”
Q&A: Michael Eisen bids to be first fly biologist in the U.S. Senate [Science] “Too much of the scientific establishment looks at the government as a bank—that the primary thing we should worry about is can we get the right amount of money out of Congress,” he says. “Too few people focus on the fact that science needs to be a partnership with the public for it to thrive.”