Onco Actu du 14 novembre 2018

	1. Biologie
Pancreatic cancer’s addiction could be its end [Cold Spring Harbor Lab] Another goal of the Vakoc team is to discover why the TP63 gene gets active in the pancreas of specific patients in the first place. “If we can stop it from ever happening,” said Somerville, “it could be really good for the survival of this most vulnerable group of cancer patients.”
	2. Etiologie
Can Neuroblastoma Be Inherited? [Dana-Farber Cancer Institute] In nearly all cases of neuroblastoma, doctors aren’t able to pinpoint a cause, and the patient does not have a family history of the disease. However, a very small minority of neuroblastomas—about 1 or 2 percent—result from a gene mutation inherited from a parent.
	3.1.1 Prévention - Tabac - e-cigs
Juul Pledges Big Changes, but the Impact May Be Small [Wired] The e-cigarette maker says it will discontinue some flavors at retail outlets and shut down social media accounts ahead of an expected FDA crackdown.
Juul Shut Down Its Facebook and Instagram [Motherboard] The vaping company that’s popular with teens is going dark on social media, and changing how it uses Twitter and YouTube.
Juul Will Suspend Selling Most E-Cigarette Flavors in Stores and Halt Social Media Promotions [NY Times] The decision by the San Francisco-based company, which has more than 70 percent of the e-cigarette market share in the United States, is the most significant sign of retrenchment by an industry that set out to offer devices to help smokers quit but now shoulders blame for a new public health problem: nicotine addiction among nonsmoking teens.
Juul Labs to pull sweet e-cig flavors to curb youth use [Reuters] Juul said it will stop selling flavors except for tobacco, mint and menthol in all retail outlets, including convenience stores and vape shops, until retailers can install technology that scans buyers’ IDs to independently verify they are aged 21 or older.
	5.1 Traitements - Pré-clinique
Novel strategy may reduce breast cancer bone metastasis [Baylor College of Medicine] “A very short treatment that combined the drug everolimus, an mTOR inhibitor, and arsenic trioxide that affects calcium transport, significantly suppressed growth of bone metastasis in our mouse model,” Zhang said.
	5.10 Traitements - Essais
How Facebook and Twitter could be the next disruptive force in clinical trials [Nature] Participants in medical research are more empowered than ever to influence the design and outcomes of experiments. Now, researchers are trying to keep up.
How a simple ‘thank you’ could improve clinical trials [Nature] Everyone would benefit if researchers did more to make participants feel part of a study.
Be open about drug failures to speed up research [Nature] Large clinical trials are multimillion-dollar experiments to validate a hypothesis that an experimental drug will be effective and safe. Results that go against these expectations must be made available to refine hypotheses and to elaborate alternative ones.
	5.12.5 Immunothérapies - Pharma
New cancer target? GSK highlights oncology ambitions with its move into the clinic with RIP1 drug for pancreatic cancer [EndPoints] By inhibiting the RIP1 enzyme, the researchers believe they can thwart what ultimately becomes an immune cell suppressor — and that’s a target attracting deep and wide attention in a variety of fields. And the mouse study provided evidence of killer T cell activation with less suppressor activity.
	5.12.8 Immunothérapies - Economie
On the heels of an Eli Lilly deal, NextCure’s hot hand in I/O attracts a $93M trans-Pacific venture round [EndPoints] NextCure, though, isn’t another PD-1/L1 play. They plan to go into novel areas, which NextCure sees as the true next-gen approach to immuno-oncology. “Our goal from the beginning: What about the non responders?” he adds.
	5.12.9 Immunothérapies - SITC
At SITC, clear wins for immunotherapy combos remain elusive [BiopharmaDive] While drugmakers continue to hunt for second-generation cancer immunotherapies, the search has yet to turn up the kind of unambiguous clinical results that some had hoped to see, cooling investor optimism in the process.
	5.3 Traitements - FDA, EMA, NICE...
EMA’s Brexit plans ensure Agency’s focus on medicines evaluation and supervision [EMA] With the exception of some delays in processing of EMA certificates, there should be no impact on other EMA procedures (e.g. scientific advice, orphan designation, paediatric investigation plans (PIPs), applications for marketing authorisation, post-authorisation activities). Companies are advised to submit applications and requests as normal.
	5.6 ESMO
ESMO Releases New Patient Guide in Prostate Cancer [ESMO] ESMO is pleased to present a new ESMO Patient Guide in Prostate Cancer, an important new edition in our Patient Guide Series.
	5.8.6 ASH - Leucémies
Immunotherapy combination and chemotherapy show encouraging results in Phase II acute myeloid leukemia study [MD Anderson Cancer Center] MD Anderson trial reveals 43 percent complete response rate for triple therapy.
	5.9.4 ENA
Patients with cancers of the gullet, stomach and bowel respond well to new anti-HER2 drug [ECCO] The latest results in 17 patients with responses available for evaluation show that 13 experienced shrinkage of their tumour. The median time the patients survived without their disease progressing was 6.21 months.
New oral drug designed to boost radiotherapy for hard-to-treat cancers can be taken safely by patients [ECCO] The drug, called 5-iodo-2-pyrimidinone-2’-deoxribose (IPdR), or ropidoxuridine, has the advantage that patients can take it in capsule form, as opposed to intravenously. When the drug enters the body, researchers believe it changes into an active form that can make cancer cells more susceptible to the effects of radiotherapy.
Drug matched to cancer patients according to tumour gene testing shows signs of being effective in early trial [ECCO] The phase 2 trial (EAY131-Y) is part of a larger USA study, called NCI-MATCH (EAY131) [2], that aims to determine whether cancer patients can be treated successfully by selecting therapies that target gene abnormalities found in their tumours, rather than by cancer type.
	6.11 Patients
As social media ‘influencers,’ patients are getting a voice. And pharma is ready to pay up [STAT] But patient influencers — paid or otherwise — are a particularly American phenomenon. In other markets, their involvement opens up a whole other can of worms. “There are still a lot of questions about how a company can do this in a compliant way, particularly in Europe” and jurisdictions where there is no direct-to-consumer advertising allowed.”
	6.6 Publications
The EU Open Access Fight Continues [In the Pipeline] As the letter goes on to say, researchers in the US, China, Japan, etc. will continue to publish in the various other journals that fall short of Plan S standards (which includes the great majority of the most widely read and well-respected ones out there, given the proposed ban on “hybrid” OA models). Joint publications will become much more difficult, as will attracting post-docs and new faculty members, as long as publishing in these journals is considered a good thing for one’s career.
	6.7.1 IA/bioinformatique
Sean Parker: Health care’s big breakthroughs aren’t going to come out of Google or Amazon [STAT] While coders face their own formidable challenges, Parker said, “tech people coming from tech to biology so dramatically underestimate the complexity of the human body. It’s not designed by us. It doesn’t work in ways that make sense.”
The new Google Health unit is absorbing health business from DeepMind, Alphabet's AI research group [CNBC] The moves are part of a broader strategy to increase collaboration and communication among Alphabet's various health projects, which are scattered across the organization.
	6.7.2 Applis
Artificial-Intelligence Smartphone App Significantly Reduced Severity of Cancer Patients’ Pain and Hospital Admissions [ASCO] A study of 112 people with metastatic solid tumors found that the use of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based smartphone app reduced both the severity of patients’ reported pain and hospital admissions. After an eight-week period, patients who used the AI-powered app to monitor and address pain experienced a 20% reduction in the severity of pain and had nearly 70% lower risk of pain-related hospital admissions than patients not using the app.
	6.7.3 DMP
Australian government agrees to extend medical record opt-out [Croakey] The Australian government agreed to extend the opt-out period for citizens from a soon-to-be-mandatory centralised online medical record system on Wednesday, bowing to pressure about unresolved privacy and data security concerns.