Word: chemo
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...trials involving 6,200 patients, should close the book on a controversial treatment that was popular during the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, doctors believed that more was better when it came to chemotherapy following cancer surgery: While it was painful for patients, oncologists thought ramping up chemo would ultimately benefit patients by destroying any cancer cells that had eluded the surgeon's knife...
...were battling breast cancer with conventional medicines and had run out of treatment options. "In their exhaustion and desperation, they were trying to find an alternative treatment that was not so harsh," says Cohen, who often prescribed herbs to be prepared as teas to ease the side effects of chemo and hormone therapy. But the patients' oncologists, says Cohen, discouraged them from trying anything new. "They'd say Chinese medicine was quackery and that there was no evidence it worked," he says. Still, Cohen observed that many of the women to whom he gave Chinese herbs, including Ban Zhi Lian...
...researchers conducted Phase I trials at Buck and at the Cancer Research Network in Plantation, Fla. Their 21 participants had stage IV metastatic breast cancer, which had continued to progress despite an average of four rounds of standard treatment, including chemo and hormone therapy. The patients took 12 g a day of Ban Zhi Lian, a dose that's three times more concentrated than the amount found in a cup of brewed tea. After about a year, 25% of the patients saw stabilization in their disease for 90 days, and 19% for 180 days. The experimenters say BZL101 works...
...mmerer's lab, "is that we are only allowed to enroll patients who have completely run out of all other therapeutic options." That means that most people in the study are faring very badly to begin with. All have exhausted traditional treatments, such as surgery, radiation and chemo, and even some alternative ones like hyperthermia and autohemotherapy. Patients in the study have pancreatic tumors and aggressive brain tumors called glioblastomas, among other cancers; participants are recruited primarily because their tumors show high glucose metabolism in PET scans...
...biopsied tissue to determine whether or not chemotherapy will be helpful for early breast cancer patients with recent diagnoses. At Duke University, molecular geneticist Joseph Nevins is testing a similar gene-based test for lung cancer. Researchers are aiming for tools that will tell them not only whether chemo is needed but also which specific drugs to use. Such a screen already exists for Herceptin, and many others are in development. Meantime, at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Dr. Roy Herbst, chief of thoracic medical oncology, is looking for protein markers on lung tumors that will enable doctors...