cancer treatments

"Hallelujah," Kim Green remembers thinking. Her life was about to get easier. For close to a decade, she had been making regular trips to the hospital, spending full days hooked up to machines that delivered chemotherapy to fight her breast cancer.

Why didn’t we do this earlier?   -Kim Green

 

Salon's Cary Tennis is one of my very favorite writers. He's on hiatus from his "Since You Asked" advice column there, where he's written quite movingly of his journey toward sobriety. Instead, he's been blogging about his cancer fight.  

March 20, 2010 -- Add endometrial carcinoma to the list of cancers that appear to be treatable with a combination of gemcitabine and cisplatin. A prospective phase 2 trial in women with advanced or recurrent endometrial cancer produced a 50% objective response rate and an 80% combined rate of clinical response plus stable disease. "These results offer a new direction for our research with women with advanced endometrial cancer," said Jubilee Brown, MD, University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center,

These results offer a new direction for our research with women with advanced endometrial cancer   -Jubilee Brown

 

It's 12.07pm last Thursday and this is Mannah's final chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma. Seated in a lounge-chair in the haemotology and oncology unit at St Vincent's Hospital, the 114kg prop looked relaxed enough to be kicking back at home watching Friday night footy. But there was no ice-cold beer.  

David H. Howard, Ph.D., of Emory University in Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed data from more than 12,000 patients, aged 66 and older, who were diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer in 1995 through 2005. Of these, 4,665 patients received chemotherapeutic medications within six months of diagnosis. The researchers found that, in patients receiving chemotherapeutic agents, life expectancy rose by 6.8 months, with an increase in lifetime costs of $37,100.  

March 19, 2010 -- Clinicians may have a new agent for patients with progressive or recurrent endometrial cancer. New data show that an agent that inhibits epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) is clinically active and tolerated by women who have been heavily pretreated with other agents. "For women with advanced endometrial cancer, treatment options are limited," said Brian Slomovitz, MD, Women's Cancer Center, Morristown, New Jersey, on March 16 here at the Society of Gynecologic Oncologists (SGO) 41  

Marina Hewgley and Will Holloway, both of Columbia, and now of Nashville and Knoxville respectively, are currently in third place in the $100,000 Ultimate Wedding Contest sponsored by Crate and Barrel. Will asked for Marina's hand in marriage just before Christmas 2009, and it was her hand that held his as Will was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma about three weeks later. Marina is the daughter of Burt and Margaret Hewgley, and Will is the son of Judge Bobby Holloway, all of Columbia.  

I've been recovering from cancer surgery and waiting for the insurance company to approve the next course of treatment, which is eight weeks of proton beam radiation therapy at Loma Linda Hospital in Southern California. This treatment is what my surgeon, Dr. Christopher Ames of UCSF, calls the standard of care for sacral chordoma. Today I learned that the insurance company has denied the request for this treatment.  

The part related to ImmunoGen, though, came when the article described Roche's plans. "Roche is testing drugs called armed antibodies that combined targeted therapy with traditional toxic cell-killing drugs. The idea is that the antibody will deliver the toxic chemotherapy directly to the tumor, maximizing effectiveness and limiting side effects." Is this not ImmunoGen's drug?