Photo credit: Bayer Pharmaceuticals

The FDA today approved the use of the drug regorafenib (brand name Stivarga) for patients whose metastatic colorectal cancer has progressed despite all currently approved treatment regimens.

This is the second new drug approved by the FDA recently after a drought of 5 years in approving new treatments for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). Regorafenib was placed into the  FDA’s “fast-track” approval process after the international, multicenter Phase III CORRECT trial  showed improved survival (from 5 to 6.4 months) in all mCRC patients, including those having both non-mutated and mutated KRAS types. Read the rest of this entry »

Fight Colorectal Cancer’s September 2012 patient webinar focused on issues that run rampant with misunderstanding and fear: palliative and hospice care.

Dr. Jim Meadows, Director of Palliative and Hospice Care at Tennessee Oncology, led the webinar. He spoke at length about palliative care, but not surprisingly, the majority of questions toward the end of the webinar focused on hospice care.

One listener had a good question that elicited a great response from Dr. Meadows. We wanted to share it with you.

Q: Isn’t hospice ‘end of life’ care? Why are you saying it prolongs life when I have heard of many people having to watch for days and even weeks while their loved one wastes away and dies? Why say it prolongs life, at what emotional cost to patient and family?

Read the rest of this entry »

More than half of all cancers could be prevented, a researcher told the International Cancer Control (UICC) World Cancer Congress 2012 , if only people actually followed the lifestyle recommendations and screening or other interventions that we already know prevent cancer.

The challenge, world experts say, is to get people doing what we know works.

Speaking at the World Congress in Montreal in early September, Graham Colditz, PD, DrPH from the Washington University School of Medicine, noted that one third of cancer in high-income countries is caused by smoking, and being overweight causes another 20% of cancers. He also estimated that increased exercise could reduce cancer by as much as 85% in coming decades.

Dr. Colditz also sited studies having 20 years of follow-up showing that aspirin is associated with a 40% reduction in mortality from colon cancer; and screening also has been shown to reduce mortality by 30 to 40%. Read the rest of this entry »

Fewer people in the U.S. are getting colorectal cancer (CRC), but that progress is seen much more often in well-off and highly educated Americans. In fact, the gap is widening in rate of colorectal deaths in people with less education and/or who live in deeply disadvantaged communities.

Researchers now have shown that differences in weight, diet and physical activity play a huge role in the higher rates and deaths from CRC among people of lower socioeconomic status.

In a paper published in the Sept. 4 2012 Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a careful statistical analysis of  a 10-year observational study of a half-million people indicated that helping people of lower education or income to change their diet, body weight, smoking and physical activity could be nearly as important as improved screening for reducing CRC deaths. Read the rest of this entry »

Time to start printing new biology textbooks: The scientific—and medical—picture of the human cell changed today from a outer-space snapshot to detailed Google map.

In a blizzard of more than 30 scientific papers published today in multiple basic scientific journals, an international research collaboration has flung open the door of the “wiring closet” of human cells–exposing at least four million gene switches that can both flick our genes on and off, and, like an electric outlet dimmer, work together in minute adjustments to turn genes up or down.

Scientists had originally assumed that only 3% of DNA was active in directing cell functions through the genes, with the other 97% of the human genome nicknamed “junk DNA” or DNA “dark matter.”

“We now know that this conclusion was wrong,” said Eric D. Green, M.D., Ph.D. , director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.

 Understanding the other 97% of DNA will help scientists understand how both genetics and environmental exposures can cause diseases—from lupus to heart disease to cancer—to appear, even in one identical twin but not the other. Read the rest of this entry »