Non-small cell lung cancer patients who have progressed on a cetuximab-containing regimen may respond to erlotinib, Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers reported.
According to Physorg, both cetuximab (Erbitux) and erlotinib (Tarceva) inhibit the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and the assumption has been that once a patient progresses on one EGFR inhibitor they will not respond to another EGFR inhibitor. The new data suggests that may not be the case.
Erlotinib is a drug used to treat non-small cell lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and several other types of cancers.
“Just because a patient received and progressed on one EGFR inhibitor doesn’t necessarily mean they will not derive clinical benefit from another one,“ says Hossein Borghaei, D.O., medical oncologist at Fox Chase. “And for patients who don’t have a lot of treatment options, we think this is a good thing. It gives them one more drug to try when their disease is progressing.“

Erlotinib is a drug used to treat non-small cell lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and several other types of cancers. (Inset) Hossein Borghaei

To find out if patients whose disease is no longer controlled by cetuximab can respond to erlotinib, Borghaei and colleagues examined the treatment and clinical outcomes for a subgroup of patients who had participated in a Fox Chase clinical trial that tested a combination of carboplatin, paclitaxel and cetuximab as first-line treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer.
Out of 53 patients who had participated in that trial, the investigators identified 15 individuals who had received erlotinib during subsequent therapy.
Of those 15 patients who received erlotinib, three remain on erlotinib. For the 12 patients who are no longer on erlotinib, the median duration of erlotinib therapy was 63 days, with a range from 36 to 222 days. The three patients remaining on therapy have been on the drug for 41, 238, and 459 days. The median progression-free survival time on erlotinib was 2.5 months for all 15 patients.
“It appears that some patients can enjoy durable disease control on erlotinib after progressing on cetuximab,“ Borghaei says. He cautions, however, that these data come from a subset analysis and are retrospective, so they are not conclusive, but are only hypothesis generating.
Although erlotinib is approved for use in patients with non-small cell lung cancer and cetuximab has been studied in this setting for several years, this is the first formal analysis to show that the drugs can be used in sequence. The tumor characteristics that predict clinical benefit from erlotinib after progression on a cetuximab--containing regimen is yet to be elucidated, but that is an area Dr. Borghaei would like to address in future studies.

African-Americans diagnosed before 2000 with a very rare kind of tumor found in or near the digestive tract were less likely than other races to receive surgery, and even when they did have surgery, they were more likely to die of the cancer.
Today, however, African-Americans with these tumors have outcomes equivalent to those in other races, according to a new study, Reuters wrote.
The differences are likely due to the availability of a treatment called imatinib, marketed as Gleevec, say the authors of the study.
Using data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registry, Dr. Leonidas G. Koniaris and colleagues from the University of Miami, Florida, compared outcomes of patients diagnosed gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) before and after imatinib was introduced in 2000.
According to their report in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 3795 patients were diagnosed with GIST between 1992 and 2005, with 30 percent diagnosed before 2000. Overall, 72 percent were white, 16 percent were African-American, and 9 percent were Hispanic.
In the earlier group, the risk of dying within 30 days of surgery was higher in African Americans than in whites, although there was no difference in the stages of the tumors found.
Also, African Americans were less likely than whites to undergo surgery (80 percent versus 88 percent).
After 2000, however, the risk of dying within 30 days of surgery was equivalent between races, as was the likelihood of having surgery.

Breast computed tomography (CT) scans, already used experimentally to diagnose breast cancer, may also be able to treat it.
“Breast CT is superior to mammography for [detecting] masses,“ said John Boone from University of California (UC) Davis.
Since 2004, Boone has led a group of UC Davis researchers in developing the breast CT scan for diagnosing breast cancer in women. The technology’s pluses, said Boone, include being more comfortable than conventional mammograms but just as safe, HealthDay wrote.
The technology has not yet made its way into clinical practice, he said, but preliminary results look good. But it is already looking to be more effective than traditional mammography at detecting breast masses.
More work needs to be done to find microcalcifications, tiny specks of calcium which don’t always mean cancer is present but bear checking, he added.
Next, Boone hopes to use the breast CT scanner to guide interventional procedures such as a robotic biopsy, radiofrequency ablation and cryoablation to treat breast cancer.
The position is considered more comfortable with the breast CT scanner.
Boone hopes that the new scanner could be used to perform image-guided therapies such as the technique known as radiofrequency ablation. “It literally heats up the tissue, cooks the tumor and kills the tumor,“ he said. It may help some women avoid lumpectomy and follow-up radiation therapy.

A sudden bright spot that appeared in the clouds of Venus just days after a comet left a bruise on Jupiter has scientists stumped as to its cause.
Venus’ bright spot, first noticed by amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, NY on July 19, is not the first such brightening noticed on our cloudy neighbor, said planetary scientist Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have seen such events before,“ he told SPACE.com.
This time is a little different though because the brightening is confined to a smaller region, Limaye said. It also came in the wake of Jupiter’s own new (dark) spot, believed to be the result of a comet impact.
After Melillo reported the spot, other amateur astronomers and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express spacecraft confirmed the presence of the blemish.
The new Venus Express images show that the bright spot actually appeared in the planet’s southern hemisphere four days before Melillo saw it and that it has since begun to spread out, becoming stretched by the wind’s in Venus’ thick atmosphere.

Brightening Reasons
But just what caused the brightening is still a mystery. Theories have abounded, from a volcanic eruption to solar particles interacting with the planet’s atmosphere.
Limaye says the volcano explanation is unlikely, for several reasons: Volcanoes on Venus seem to be less likely to blow their tops in Mount St. Helens-type fashion, instead behaving more like the oozing lava factories of Hawaii, so their eruptions wouldn’t likely produce huge clouds of ash and steam. Also, it is unlikely that the explosions would have the power to push through to the other layers of Venus’ extremely dense atmosphere.
Another explanation is that a coronal mass ejection (an energetic plume of plasma from the sun’s corona) or the solar wind could have interacted with the clouds of Venus.
Yet another possibility is some internal change in Venus’ atmosphere that could alter cloud particles and make them more reflective (and therefore brighter as viewed from space).
“Clearly something in the cloud properties changed,“ Limaye said.

Researchers are aiming at using mechanized nanoparticles for anti-cancer drug delivery. Nanoparticles that are able to make basic decisions about whether to release their contents offer the prospect of delivering drugs exactly when and where they are needed, say chemists.
According to NewScientist, their particles only respond to two distinct and simultaneous stimuli, acting like an “AND“ computer logic gate that only produces an output signal if it receives two input signals.
A localized, concentrated dose could be delivered at the site of the disease and the rest of the body would be spared by programming the particles to respond to specific conditions within the body.