News

Researchers in Israel have completed a clinical trial that successfully tested the use of gene therapy to restore sight to patients suffering from Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA).

Stem cell-based therapy is an important potential treatment to restore vision in patients with a wide range of retina disease.

A study published online on May 10, 2011 in the British Journal of Cancer has shown evidence for a new prognostic factor in breast cancer: an increase in cancer stem cell population after primary systemic therapy. The study results indicate that putative cancer stem cells may be chemoresistant to conventional anthracycline-based chemotherapy and may have a role in disease progression following chemotherapy treatment.

In the first in-human study fo human umbilical tissue-derived cells as cell-based therapy for retinal degenerative diseases, all seven patients tolerated the subretinal injection well and had no postoperative visual loss.

The dream that stem cell therapy may someday be used to protect against or restore glaucoma-related vision loss seems to be moving closer to reality.

Patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer achieved a significant increase in survival time when tumor treating fields (TTF) therapy was added to their chemotherapy. In a single-arm, phase II study, physicians delivered TTF therapy, using the NovoTTF-100L from Novocure, to 42 patients with stage IIIb-IV metastatic NSCLC who had failed prior treatments. Patients in the study received TTF therapy for 12 hours a day in combination with pemetrexed (Alimta) every three weeks until disease progression.

Research from Japan documenting remarkable survival rates among patients with inoperable lung cancer may only hint at the potential of proton-beam radiation therapy. The study out of the Proton Medical Research Center in Tennoudai, Japan, documented high survival rates for 55 patients suffering from stage I inoperable non-small-cell lung cancer.

Despite the fact that elderly patients comprise over 50% of the non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) population, our knowledge regarding the efficacy and safety of chemotherapy in this group is suboptimal. The “elderly” (defined as individuals ≥70 years of age) experience physiologically normal aging of their bone marrow and kidneys, which inherently increases toxicity to therapy. Standard practice has often been to discourage the use of combination chemotherapy in these patients; however, general consensus guidelines emphasize that performance status should primarily guide the choice of treatment. Elderly patients with advanced NSCLC treated with platinum doublet therapy demonstrate similar efficacy (but increased toxicity) to their younger counterparts. Patients with metastatic disease in which a targeted and/or biological agent(s) was added to chemotherapy experienced benefits similar to those treated with standard platinum doublets, but with increased morbidity and mortality. In the future, effective testing of molecular targeted therapies will have to include elderly patients among research cohorts or risk excluding a large population of eligible patients. Overall, elderly patients with advanced NSCLC, while experiencing greater toxicity, demonstrate the same response rates and survival benefits as their younger peers.

The role of radiation therapy (RT) in lung cancer is long established; some of the earliest Radiation Therapy Oncology Group reports dealt with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).[1,2] More recently, the advent of stereotactic body RT (SBRT) techniques has provided significant local control rates after focused treatment of selected small metastases and inoperable early stage lesions.[3,4] Our center has been in the forefront of examining SBRT and its role in central [5] or bilateral [6] lesions, its effect on PET imaging [7] and pulmonary function testing,[8] and subsequent frequency of brachial plexopathy,[9] chest wall toxicity,[10] or pneumonitis.[11] Still, even this highly conformal technique comes with potentially significant dose to adjacent normal tissue. This is in the context of an emerging appreciation for the pulmonary consequences of elevated mean lung dose,[12] or V5 after pneumonectomy.[13] For each lung cancer patient requiring RT, an effective mechanism to deliver dose to the tumor while minimizing dose to uninvolved lung is called for. Enter protons.