Cancer Cells

When a young woman is diagnosed with cancer, getting pregnant is probably the last thing on her mind. But if she wants children in the future, it's something she should think about. The chemotherapy and radiation treatments used to treat cancer can hurt a women's fertility. Nearly 10 percent of the 1.5 million diagnosed with cancer each year are of childbearing age, according to the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Melissa M. Yates, an assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, says these women need to think about fertility preservation before they begin treatment for cancer.

Only a minority of patients treated with a breakthrough lung-cancer drug appear to benefit, a discovery that is sending researchers back to the drawing board, doctors in Manhattan said yesterday. Before federal approval of Iressa last year, patients had clamored for the drug and legions of patient advocates lobbied and met with congressional leaders, demanding approval of the drug. Iressa is one of a burgeoning class of cancer drugs known as "targeted therapy." Unlike conventional chemotherapy, targeted medications home in on specific cellular receptors, sites that stud the surface of cancer cells.

A new test that involves looking for signs of damage in the DNA of breast cells may provide an early way to identify women at high risk for breast cancer, a research team in Seattle reported yesterday.The studies, reported in the journal Cancer, are very preliminary and the test is not fully developed. But the results suggest that an accurate way may be found to measure the gene damage that leads to cancer, even before cancer can begin."We use a special type of microscope to look at the inner structure of the DNA molecule," said biochemist Donald Malins.

For the first time, researchers have decoded all the genes of a person with cancer and found a set of mutations that may have caused the disease or aided its progression. Using cells donated by a woman in her 50s who died of leukemia, the scientists sequenced all the DNA from her cancer cells and compared it with the DNA from her normal, healthy skin cells. Then, they zeroed in on 10 mutations that occurred only in the cancer cells, apparently spurring abnormal growth, preventing the cells from suppressing that growth and enabling them to fight off chemotherapy.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Scientists might have one of the most effective weapons yet in the fight against deadly ovarian cancer if a treatment presented yesterday in Orlando succeeds in clinical tests."

I've heard that there are cancer vaccines. If I get one, will it prevent cancer? Although many cancer vaccines are now being studied, so far, none has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, said Jeffrey Schlom, chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology at the National Cancer Institute. And when they are approved, they will be aimed not at preventing disease, like the flu and polio vaccines, but to keep cancer from coming back after treatment. Cancer vaccines are "therapeutic," meaning that they're designed to rev up the immune system to fight a cancer that's already present, or to keep the immune system primed to notice and fight any cancer cells that recur.

Dean Gordanier, 54, is a tax lawyer, fitness buff, father of three and veteran of the roller-coaster ride of hope and despair that is a way of life for growing numbers of people with cancer, thanks to the promise, and the heartbreak, of new drugs. Many of these "targeted therapies" are scientifically breathtaking. With names like Gleevec, Avastin, Iressa and the still-nameless SU11248, these drugs are the closest scientists have come yet to the holy grail - knocking out cancer cells without wreaking too much havoc on the rest of the body.

Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the cancer that struck King Hussein of Jordan, comes in many forms. While the prognosis varies significantly according to the type, any form can act unpredictably.Some such cancers wax and wane over years. Many people live for decades, hardly bothered by their lymphoma. Some may not need treatment for long periods.Many others, like the king, develop a form that is highly aggressive and succumb swiftly, even after they have an apparently successful bone marrow transplant and other powerful but risky therapies.

At Harford Friends School, an unusual field trip for middle school resulted from an equally unusual assignment for Cheryl Foley's science class: reading and discussing "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. " Eighth-graders from Harford Friends School recently toured the original lab at Johns Hopkins, where the HeLa cells were discovered. A HeLa cell is a cell type in an immortal cell line used in scientific research. Although many groups tour the facility every day, this group of middle schoolers was one of the youngest ever to be received by researchers.

For years, Michael G. Hanna had a radical vision for how cancer might be treated in the not-too-distant future.His dream: A cancer patient is given an injection of a drug that is so "smart" it zooms directly to tumor cells, bypassing healthy ones. The body's own defenses are alerted to attack the tumor, and the triggers for new cancer growth are disarmed.Like Hanna, cancer researchers in the United States and Europe have long toiled on just such a magic bullet. Hurdles, though, have been high.