Get help managing the financial costs of your cancer care from an ASCO booklet or figure out how to deal with the Medicare prescription doughnut hole using an AARP online calculator.

In research, Lynch syndrome women have excellent survival after ovarian cancer, older patients have similar effectiveness and side effects from Avastin, and parents with advanced cancer often underestimate how upset their children are.  Long-term cancer survivors have no more depression than people without cancer. Read the rest of this entry »

An oral drug that blocks activity of enzymes that change proteins in cells that leads to cancer is being tested at the National Institutes of Health.

R935788 or Fostamatinib, a protein kinase inhibitor, is in a Phase II clinical trial for patients with several types of advanced cancer, including colorectal cancer.  Patients whose cancer has gotten worse on previous treatment are eligible to participate.  The trial is being conducted at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh are testing a vaccine to recognize a protein in colon polyps and trigger the immune system to destroy them.

MUC1 is a protein found in precancerous colorectal polyps and in colon cancer. The experimental vaccine causes the body’s immune system to develop antibodies against MUC1, killing tissue that contains it and potentially preventing polyps from returning. Read the rest of this entry »

I wanted to share with you another novel clinical trial using a compound targeting two receptors on tumor cells. Both receptors we know very well: one is HER2, the target for Herceptin, and the other one is EGFR, the target for Erbitux.

One compound targeting both receptors is on the market known as Tykerb® (lapatinib) which is approved for breast cancer patients in combination with Xeloda® (capecitabine). Read the rest of this entry »

Results from two colonoscopies three years apart gave better information about whether a high-risk polyp would be found on a third exam than results from the second test alone.

Even if a second colonoscopy, done three years after the first, showed no adenomas at all, 8 in 100 study participants with high-risk polyps on their first exam had developed a high-risk polyp by six years when they had a third colonoscopy. Read the rest of this entry »