Cancer Center

MONEY from the 50-state tobacco settlement provides an unprecedented opportunity for Maryland to boost funding for cancer research and treatment and become a national model in caring for cancer patients.Indeed, Maryland is poised to become the country's premier center for cancer research and treatment. Our resources are abundant: the University of Maryland's cancer center, the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, the National Institutes of Health and all the related medical service and research firms in this area.

The Johns Hopkins Cancer Center will soon leave its cramped, outdated quarters for a pair of spacious buildings that are designed for a new era of cancer research and treatment.Standing on opposite sides of North Broadway, the $125 million clinical center and $59 million research building will open at a time of mounting competition among hospitals and explosive growth in scientists' understanding of the disease.The nine-story clinical tower, with 132 patient beds and room for hundreds of outpatients, will be formally dedicated tomorrow at ceremonies in its tall, airy atrium.

Howard County General Hospital unveiled yesterday its version of a trend in health care -- providing rooms that resemble those in hotels, if not those in patients' homes.The hospital used a homelike motif -- hardwood floors, wall-paper and paintings -- in renovating a 29-bed nursing unit. The $2.5 million, 13,000-square-foot 4 South Nursing Unit will accommodate its first patients -- primarily those with cancer -- on Tuesday."We want to offer a more comfortable atmosphere so patients will be less traumatized by hospitalization," said Judy Siegelman, administrative coordinator for the unit.

With his diagnosis of colon cancer, Eric Davis finds himself in crowded company. Each year, 131,000 people in the United States receive the same news he did -- making it the fourth most frequently detected cancer.But at 35, he finds himself in a small minority."It is generally a disease of the elderly," said Jill Brensinger, a genetic counselor at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center. "Generally, colon cancer is a disease we hear about in people in their sixties, seventies and eighties."Less than 5 percent of all cases occur in people 35 or younger, she said.

Last November, just days after his wife died of breast cancer, Dr. William B. Mayer was asked for permission to use her name for a new cancer center at Howard County General Hospital.Thinking it would be a cancer treatment center, the obstetrician-gynecologist immediately agreed.A week later when he learned that the new facility -- now called the Claudia R. Mayer Cancer Resource and Image Center -- would help patients and their families handle the emotional aspects of cancer, he became thoroughly convinced that it should bear his wife's name.

Marlene Greenebaum remembers a time when she actually referred to it euphemistically as the C-word. But that was a lifetime ago, before the bilateral mastectomy in the summer of 1990 and before the subsequent chemotherapy.Having faced cancer and won, her name now is very boldly and publicly linked with the very same word from which she once shied away in private conversation with friends.A glass and chrome elevator opens on the ninth floor of the Gudelsky Building at the University of Maryland Medical System to reveal gleaming brass letters that proclaim this space as the Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center.

Baltimore philanthropist Harvey "Bud" Meyerhoff has pledged $3 million to the Johns Hopkins University as part of the university's $900 million campaign.Meyerhoff, a Hopkins university trustee who formerly headed the Johns Hopkins Hospital's board of trustees, previously established an endowed professorship in Near Eastern Studies and a cancer prevention center at Hopkins' School of Public Health. The cancer center was named in honor of him and his late wife, Lyn Meyerhoff.The new gift includes $2 million toward the completion of Hopkins' $97 million comprehensive cancer center; $500,000 for a fellowship at Hopkins' Nitze School for Advanced International Studies; and $500,000 for an endowed professorship in bioethics at the public health school.

There was a moment of silence in the Overlea High School auditorium as Barbara Samuelson told 150 young women how she discovered cancer in her right breast.A mother of two young children, Mrs. Samuelson was 32 when she felt a suspicious breast lump while taking a shower. She eventually lost both breasts after her cancer was diagnosed, but the disease has not recurred. She will celebrate her 53rd birthday this month."Every cancer is different," she told the girls. "Every case is different.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, a Baltimore philanthropy almost as reclusive as the couple it is named after, now appears ready to play a more public role in the city's life.Yesterday, officials announced that the Weinberg Foundation had pledged $20 million toward the Johns Hopkins Hospital's cancer center -- the largest gift in the history of both the philanthropy and the hospital.Last year, trustees of the foundation awarded $15 million to Sinai Hospital in Northwest Baltimore, where a building is now named after them.

DALLAS -- Women ages 40 to 49 don't necessarily need to undergo regular mammograms, according to a proposed new recommendation from the National Cancer Institute.A panel of physicians and researchers is urging a change in the institute's mammography guidelines, recommending that women get mammograms every one to two years beginning at age 50. From age 40 to 49, the institute advises women to consult their doctors.Current guidelines from the National Cancer Institute and other agencies recommend routine mammograms, which are used to detect breast cancer, every one to two years beginning at age 40.The new recommendation will be published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Men in suits and women in high heels swirled on the ballroom dance floor at Martin's West as a big band played and candelabras shone on a sea of dinner tables. Dr. Diana Griffiths of St. Agnes Hospital had to concentrate on faces to recognize her cancer patients. "I'm so used to seeing people in a hospital setting," she said. "This is real life." Hospitals and cancer support groups across Maryland participated in National Cancer Survivors Day on Sunday, a time set aside to celebrate the 12 million Americans who have overcome the disease.

The case was fairly routine: The patient felt a lump smaller than a pea, had a mammogram, got a diagnosis of breast cancer and quickly underwent a mastectomy. What was different is this patient was a man - Mike Nelsen, a 49-year-old high-level sales executive who never saw himself at risk."I remember distinctly sitting in a conference room when my cell phone rang," Nelsen said recently. It was his doctor, so Nelsen walked out into the hall to hear the news. "I guess I don't get shocked by a lot but I didn't even think men could have breast cancer.

In a discovery that researchers hope could lead to better treatments for intractable brain tumors, scientists from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Duke University Medical Center have found a genetic defect in a large number of common brain cancers and believe it could hold clues to why some people with the disease fare better than others. The findings, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, could ultimately help determine biologically how deadly a tumor is, providing far more information than what doctors can now learn by examining these cancers under a microscope.

Bobbie Burnett proudly displays the different designs her stained-glass angels have taken over the past 26 years. She gave her first angel as a gift to a friend with leukemia. Then she started selling angels to pay for Susie Lyttle's care. Burnett contributed only $200 to Lyttle before she died in 1983. Now Burnett has a loftier goal spelled out in gold lettering in the middle of the wall where her angels stand watch: to reach $1 million in total donations. Her 90 volunteers, who rotate shifts in her Annapolis studio three days a week, make angel figurines and pins, along with sun catchers of birds, flowers and other images.

Anne Arundel Medical Center has appointed Dr. Barry R. Meisenberg, the former head of the hematology-oncology division at the University of Maryland's Cancer Center, as the new director of its Geaton and JoAnn DeCesaris Cancer Institute. Martin L. Doordan, president and CEO of Anne Arundel Health System, said the hiring of Meisenberg reinforces the medical system's commitment to excellence in oncology care. "Recruiting a physician of national caliber such as Dr. Meisenberg was only possible because of the overall excellence of our programs, talent of our medical and nursing staffs and investment in our facilities," Doordan said.

Office of Planning to close today so it can move The county Office of Planning will be closed from noon today until Monday morning to enable it to move to new quarters. The office will be located in Suite 101 of the Jefferson Building, 105 W. Chesapeake Ave. in Towson. The office's phone numbers will remain the same. Because of the move, the Planning Board has canceled a meeting scheduled for Thursday. The next board meeting will be June 19 in Hearing Room 102 of the Jefferson Building.

Dr. Martin D. Abeloff, an internationally recognized oncologist who led the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center for 15 years, died of leukemia yesterday at the hospital where he spent most of his professional career. The Mount Washington resident was 65. An advocate of mammography as a means of reducing breast cancer mortality rates, he spent much of his professional career working to apply research findings to everyday medicine. Under his leadership, some 30,000 outpatients visited his center a year.

SAN ANTONIO -- Significantly fewer American women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, and a drastic drop in the use of hormone therapy is the most likely reason, researchers reported yesterday. Breast cancer diagnoses dropped by 7 percent overall and by about 15 percent in women over 50, the group most likely to have been taking hormone therapy before a well-publicized federal warning scared millions into stopping in 2002. It won't be certain that the decreases are not an aberration until April, when figures for 2004 are released.

The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins has been awarded $20 million to further its research into the genetic underpinnings of cancer. Coming two months after Hopkins researchers reported that they had sequenced the genomes of colon and breast tumors, the grant will help them explore the genetics of several other tumor types. "It's clear that the best way to understand the nature of cancer and how it occurs is through the study of genetic alterations," said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, who co-directs a cancer genetics laboratory with Dr. Kenneth Kinzler.

On June 21, 2006, THOMAS JOSEPH, JR., beloved son of the late THOMAS JOSEPH CASE, SR., and Dorothy Alice Barber Case; loving husband of Jacqueline T. Schrenker-Case; devoted father of daughter Courtney Taylor Case; brother of Sharon C. Amen; and uncle of niece Jennifer Anderson and nephew Brad Wash. A Memorial Service will be held on Friday June 30, 2006 at 1:00 P.M. at Grace Lutheran Church, 21 Carroll St., Westminster, MD 21157. Interment will be private. Memorial contributions may be made in his memory to the Kimmel Cancer Center, c/o John Hopkins Cancer Center, 100 N. Charles Street, 1 Charles Center, Suite 200, Baltimore, MD 21201.