Google DeepMind is going to try and help the NHS Cancer

DeepMind, a Google-owned AI research lab in London, has announced its plans to explore whether its technology can be used to help the NHS treat head and neck cancers.
Through a new partnership with University College London Hospital, the company's third with an NHS organization, Google DeepMind will aim to establish whether machine learning techniques could reduce the amount of time it takes to plan radiotherapy treatment for such cancers
Treating cancers that are found in the head and neck with readiotherapy requires a great deal of precision. Clinicians must "segment" the tumor from healthy tissue and feed this information into a radiotherapy machine which then kills off the harmful cells.
Producing these detailed outlines can take clinicians up to four hours but Google DeepMind thinks that this time could be slashed to around an hour.

Gene tests identify Breast Cancer patients who can skip Chemo

A new study helps answer that question, based on a test of gene activity in tumors. It found that nearly half of women with early-stage breast cancer who would traditionally receive chemo can avoid it, with little risk of the cancer coming back or spreading in the next five years.

The so-called genomic test measures the activity of genes that control the growth and spread of cancer, and can identify women with a low risk of recurrence and therefore little to gain from chemo.

“More and more evidence is mounting that there is a substantial number of women with breast cancer who will not need chemotherapy to do well,” said Dr. Rachel A. Freedman, a breast cancer oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

A decade of obesity raises your Cancer risk

The longer a woman is overweight or obese, the more her risk of cancer may increase along with the time.

A new longitudinal study on postmenopausal women, published in the journal PLOS Medicine on Tuesday, reveals that the duration of having a high body mass index is linked to a higher risk of developing several types of cancer, from breast to endometrial.

It's the first study to explore the relationship between overweight duration and cancer risk in a large cohort of women, said Melina Arnold, a scientist at the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer and lead author of the study.

"Given the result from previous studies supporting the overall link between obesity and cancer, our results are in line with what we know about this relationship," Arnold said. "Yet it adds to current scientific evidence by suggesting that there seems to be a cumulative effect of obesity on cancer risk."

New Lupus Treatment

Sometimes in medicine, a drug originally created to serve one purpose finds success in treating another condition. Such is the case in a recent study which found that a drug originally developed to boost the immune system in cancer patients is now showing promise as a potential treatment for lupus, a serious autoimmune disease where the body attacks its own organs and tissues.
Using much smaller doses of a natural immune system protein called IL-2 than needed to treat cancer patients, researchers saw that the drug was able to restore balance to the overactive immune system of lupus patients. IL-2 proved to be both safe and effective and could be involved in clinical trials for lupus treatment very soon.
For the study, IL-2 was given to people whose lupus wasn’t responding well to standard treatments. The drug was able to calm the patients’ hyperactive immune systems “through multiple mechanisms,” Professor Eric Morand, co-author of the study, explained.

Outdated assessment of treatment response makes good Cancer drugs look bad

Tumor shrinkage is not the only measure of a successful anti-cancer therapy. A University of Colorado Cancer Center article published in the journal Frontiers in Oncology describes a promising alternative: metabolic imaging. Tumors rush their metabolism to grow and proliferate. By recognizing a drug's ability to stop this energy overuse, doctors may be able to determine a patient's response to a new, targeted therapy far earlier and with far more precision than watching and waiting for a tumor to shrink.
"What we have been using for decades is called RECIST - it measures the dimensions of a tumor and it does a good job of showing a patient's response to chemotherapy and radiation. These therapies (called cytotoxic) kill cells and so if they are working, we see the tumor shrink," says Natalie Serkova, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
However, many modern targeted therapies do not immediately kill cancer cells. Instead, they interrupt a cancer cell's ability to grow and proliferate, often by immediate cessation of metabolic rates. Eventually these cells "interrupted" by targeted therapies die, but cell death and tumor shrinkage are not immediate, direct markers of a therapy's usefulness. Serkova points out that a recent article published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology shows that 15 percent of patients who are taken off clinical trials due to perceived lack of response to a trial medication aren't in fact non-responders - the drug may be working for these people in a way that is not captured by RECIST.
One possible solution is to image a tumor's metabolic rate, such as glucose uptake. "Cancer are gluttons for glucose," Eckhardt says, meaning that in order to drive their growth, cancers burn glucose at many times the rate of healthy cells. Drugs including anti-EGFR therapies stop cancer cells' ability to over-use glucose.
"These new therapies stop a cancer cell's glucose uptake within 24 hours after the first dose, but changes in tumor volume happen months later," Eckhardt says. Is the drug working? Watching for changes in a tumor's use of glucose could answer this question months earlier than current RECIST criteria.

Bristol-Myers drug fails Lung Cancer study

A blockbuster cancer treatment failed in a key study as the drug's maker, Bristol-Myers Squibb, attempts to extend its usage for lung cancer patients.

Shares of the New York company plunged 16 percent Friday, its biggest one-day drop in 14 years. Shares of rival Merck & Co., which makes a rival cancer drug, spiked 10 percent to reach an 18-year high.

Bristol's drug, Opdivo, and Merck's drug Keytruda are immunotherapies, which bolster the immune system so that patients can better fight cancer. Both drugs are already approved to treat melanoma and lung cancer, but only after chemotherapy.

In June, Merck reported positive results from a key study focusing on Keytruda as a lone treatment for lung cancer. The negative results from Bristol appear to put Merck in the lead for treating cancer patients without resorting to chemotherapy and its drastic side effects.

The latest late-stage study for Opdivo involved 541 patients who had received no prior treatment for lung cancer.

CVS cuts coverage of Cancer drugs in exclusion expansion

CVS Health Corp. will add 35 products to its lists of excluded drugs in 2017 and no longer cover some treatments for cancer and diabetes, in an aggressive move to favor lower-priced treatments and target what the company called “hyperinflation” of some other products.
The drug benefit manager will remove coverage for Novartis AG’s leukemia treatment Tasigna, Medivation Inc.’s prostate cancer drug Xtandi, and Sanofi’s insulin Lantus, expanding the company’s strategy of excluding expensive products when alternatives are available. The total number of excluded drugs for 2017 will be 131, spokeswoman Carolyn Castel said Tuesday.
It’s the first time that brand-name cancer drugs have been taken off CVS’s standard formula.
Cancer has been one area where pharmacy benefit managers have been reluctant to push exclusions. Yet the rise in prices for pills to treat forms of the disease, combined with the availability of good alternatives, drove CVS to remove some brand-name medications for the first time.

The 2016 Cancer Drugs Fund in England

A ‘new’ version of the English Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) will come into force on July 29, 2016, later than the anticipated April 2016 start. This is the latest evolution of a fund that was first put forward in 2010.
The CDF pays for those cancer drugs that NICE says are not cost effective, or that NICE hasn’t looked at, or those that are in limbo, waiting for NICE’s recommendation.
Reading between the lines it’s clear that companies will need to discount, probably quite heavily, to achieve market access with the prospect of providing rebates too. In return, they’ll potentially get faster NICE appraisal and interim funding from the point of marketing authorization.
With no change to the threshold on cost effectiveness, £20,000 to £30,000 ($26,000-$40,000) cost per Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYS) in most cases, or up to £50,000 ($66,000) for end of life drugs  the discount required could be significant. (And as an aside, NICE has accepted drugs at a higher cost effectiveness threshold and it seems to have been brought down to the maximum of £50,000($66,000) cost per QALY).
Re-appraisal will likely take place in two years, or perhaps longer, depending on how long data needs to be collected for. Reflecting the fragmented nature of the NHS these days, the discussion for those companies given a maybe NICE recommendation also needs to be with NICE on what evidence will be good enough to inform their re-appraisal in future and Public Health England (PHE) who have the responsibility for the key dataset that is expected to be used, the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy dataset (SACT).

More accurate Prostate Cancer prognosis

Men diagnosed with prostate cancer can be provided with a more accurate estimate of their risk of death from the disease, and treatment planned accordingly, according to a Research Article published by Vincent J. Gnanapragasam, of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK and colleagues in PLOS Medicine.
Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers affecting men, and the risk of disease progression and death is very variable when the disease is diagnosed while it is localized to the prostate gland. Providing as accurate an estimate as possible of the individual risk is important in planning appropriate treatment, which could range from surgery to management by regular observation, as well as in providing advice and support to patients.
Based on data from more than 10,000 UK men with prostate cancer, Gnanapragasam and colleagues developed a scheme in which men were grouped into 5 strata with different levels of risk of prostate cancer death, based on straightforward, routinely available, clinical measurements such as prostate specific antigen (PSA) level, disease stage, and tumor grade as judged by biopsy. In two large groups of men with prostate cancer analyzed separately, this scheme performed better in predicting the risk of cancer death compared to the current 3 risk strata system endorsed by most national and international guidelines.

UPDATE: Cuban researchers battle Lung Cancer with a Vaccine

It is called CIMAvax, and while CIM calls it a vaccine, it is important to note the drug does not prevent disease like a traditional vaccine, at least in its current form. It instead keeps diagnosed tumors in check by inhibiting their growth, acting more as a treatment. This is known as a therapeutic vaccine.

Rather than target the cancer cells directly, the vaccine acts as a form of immunotherapy, harnessing the body's own immune system to fight the cancer instead.

Other countries are participating in clinical trials for CIMAvax, including Japan and some in Europe. The United States is also interested. As the two countries continue to normalize relations after half a century of dispute, FDA clinical trials could start this year and will run in partnership with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.

A range of clinical trials have enabled the vaccine to be tested in 5000 patients worldwide, including 1000 in Cuba. In one small trial, patients younger than 60 lived on average 11 months longer than those who did not receive the vaccination.

New approach for treating Skin Cancer

University of California, Irvine molecular biologists and their colleagues have identified an effective way to combat metastatic melanoma. Led by Alexander D. Boiko, UCI assistant professor of molecular biology & biochemistry at the Ayala School of Biological Sciences and the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Center, the researchers discovered that blocking the cell surface protein, CD47 (known as a "don't eat me" signal), on melanoma cells, increased the degree by which these cells were phagocytosed, or "eaten," by macrophages. The team further discovered that blocking CD47 in combination with targeting a second cell surface protein, CD271, previously found to be expressed on melanoma initiating cells, resulted in virtually complete inhibition of metastases arising from human melanoma.

Prostate Cancer breakthrough

Prostate cancer patients have been offered hope after scientists at Newcastle University, UK, have identified a new group of molecules that could be targeted to slow tumor growth.

Experts used an advanced screening technique which found hundreds of genes were affected by the male hormone testosterone. It is believed this could lead to new diagnostic tests and treatments.
Among the 700 genes identified was an important set that add sugar groups, known as glycans, to the surface of prostate cancer cells. This group has never been investigated before.
Results of the research, published in EBioMedicine, suggest that testosterone changes glycans to make cancer cells more likely to survive, grow and spread to other parts of the body.
Scientists say there is the potential to target these glycans which could stop the growth and spread of tumors and save lives.
Dr Jennifer Munkley, Research Associate at the Institute of Genetic Medicine, Newcastle University, co-led the three-year research project with Professor David Elliott.