Cancer Treatment

The chief of psychiatry at New York's famed Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center says Americans place a "terrible burden" on themselves and their families when they conclude that something in their own personality has brought on or worsened their cancer.The burden is unfair and unsupported by facts, said Dr. Jimmie C. Holland. "It's enough to get cancer without thinking you brought it on yourself."So far, she said, there is no conclusive evidence that our state of mind has any power to cause cancer or to change its outcome.

Traditional medicine may succeed no better than unorthodox cancer treatments, including a vegetarian diet and coffee enemas, in prolonging the life of patients with terminal cancer.But traditional treatments, despite the notorious side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, afford patients a significantly better quality of life during their remaining months or years than does the alternative approach.Those are the conclusions of a provocative study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Connecticut men's basketball coach Jim Calhoun is being treated for a second bout of skin cancer, but he expects to be on the bench this fall for his 22nd season with the Huskies. "I want to coach basketball at UConn," the Hall of Famer, 66, said yesterday. "At this moment I love what I'm doing." His physician, Jeffrey Spiro, attended the news conference with Calhoun and said he believes the coach is now cancer free and has a good prognosis. Calhoun is to undergo six weeks of radiation treatments to minimize any chance of the cancer returning.

The message sounded desperate. "I need to raise $1,900 before the end of the night," it said. "My medical bills and everything has totally put us in the poor house. … I want to live and I want to stop losing stuff just because of this cancer. " The Facebook plea was from Dina Perouty Leone, who at the time, in June 2009, "was asking everyone and their brother for money," according to the message's recipient, Maurica Marcum, a former classmate of Leone's at Sparrows Point High School.

Celsion Corp. said yesterday that it had applied to the Food and Drug Administration to begin human testing of a new prostate-cancer treatment. If the treatment is cleared for testing by the FDA, up to 30 patients will get infusions of a chemotherapy drug enclosed in tiny fat vesicles known as liposomes. The heat-activated liposomes are designed to accumulate in the prostate tumor, then quickly dump their therapeutic contents - the drug Adriamycin - when targeted by a Celsion focused-heat system.

Guilford Pharmaceuticals Inc. said yesterday that it has formally submitted additional data to the Food and Drug Administration to support expanded use of its only marketed product, the brain cancer treatment Gliadel. The Baltimore company hopes the data - which appears to show improved long-term survival for certain patients who get Gliadel - prompts the FDA to reverse its earlier decision to reject expanded marketing of the chemotherapy-packed wafer. Gliadel is implanted in the cavity left when a brain tumor is surgically removed.

Fifty-five years ago, a Chicago surgeon named Dr. Charles Huggins discovered that prostate cancer cells needed testosterone to grow. He showed that removing or blocking the action of this male sex hormone could cause prostate cancers to shrink and suppress their ability to spread. The finding brought him the Nobel Prize and made anti-testosterone therapy the standard treatment for advanced prostate cancer.Now, Dr. Shutsung Liao, a biochemist who has been a longtime colleague of Huggins at the University of Chicago, has discovered that the relationship between prostate cancer and testosterone is not quite so simple.

EntreMed, a small Rockville biopharmaceutical company, and drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. have jointly launched the first human clinical trials in the United States to determine whether thalidomide, the sedative banned decades ago because causes birth defects, may provide a dramatic new way to treat cancer.If that proves true, the drug, which triggered a mountain of lawsuits in the 1950s, could become a big profit generator again, say pharmaceutical industry analysts.Critical Phase II trials are being launched this month at three medical institutions, Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center in Bethesda and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Donna Pettrey got a chance for life yesterday.Adm. Frank B. Kelso II, chief of naval operations and acting Navy secretary, gave the go-ahead for the 24-year-old Reisterstown woman to receive a special blood treatment, considered her only chance against an aggressive and fatal cancer.A Navy doctor said Mrs. Pettrey probably would be examined at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, then transferred to the Wilfordhall Medical Center in San Antonio, where the treatment will be performed.

GenVec, a Rockville biotechnology company, has launched a human clinical trial on a therapy it has developed to treat a leading cause of cancer death: colon cancer that has metastasized to the liver.This is the second clinical trial GenVec has launched in its quest to get a product approved for marketing.The company is close to wrapping up a key human trial on a gene therapy vector that it developed for cystic fibrosis.The privately held company, which is engaged in a pioneering field of medicine called gene therapy, is hoping to show in the trial at New York Hospital in New York that the therapy is safe so it can seek Food and Drug Administration approval for wider studies to show it's effective.