Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is reporting that its researchers, led by oncologist J. Marc Pipas, M.D., have devised a new treatment for pancreatic cancer. According to the medical center, up to fifty percent of patients in the study responded to the novel therapy, which is one of the highest response rates ever seen for pancreatic CA:

“The only way to cure these tumors is to remove them completely,” explains Pipas. “You try to do something to make sure there is no microscopic disease left. If you can’t remove it, the prognosis is poor.”
In the Norris Cotton Cancer Center trial, 24 patients were treated with short course, high dose chemotherapy of docetaxel and gemcitabine, followed by a combination of radiation and twice-weekly low-dose gemcitabine. Chemotherapy doses in this trial were higher than previously attempted.
Results showed that 50% of tumors shrank by at least a third, including complete disappearance of a tumor in a patient who previously had been judged inoperable. No tumors progressed during treatment.
The ability to shrink a pancreatic tumor is important because in order to eradicate the cancer, the tumor must be small enough to be completely removed without damaging major blood vessels surrounding the pancreas. Seventeen patients in the study underwent surgery, including nine previously considered inoperable or borderline operable. Subsequent follow-up showed that no patient whose tumor was surgically removed had a local recurrence of the disease, and no patient whose disease was considered inoperable had local progression.
Because the treatment Pipas and his team developed is allowing more patients the option of surgery, it is now the standard treatment for pancreatic cancer at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center.
In a new study, Pipas is using gemcitabine and radiation in combination with cetuximab (Erbitux®), an antibody treatment. Norris Cotton Cancer Center is the only center testing this treatment for pancreatic cancer.

More at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center…

Broccoli is the main source of a natural compound called sulforaphane, the active chemical which is believed to offer some protection from cancer. But, if you are among the fifty per cent of the population lacking the GSTM1 gene, your body might be getting less protection from broccoli according to the research conducted at UK’s Institute of Food Research (IFR).
Super broccoli contains 3.4 times more sulforaphane than standard varieties. It has been developed by traditional plant breeding methods.

Lead scientist on the new research, Professor Richard Mithen of the IFR, said: “Eating a few portions of broccoli each week may help to reduce the risk of cancer. Some individuals, who lack a gene called GSTM1, appear to get less cancer protection from broccoli than those who have the gene.
“Our studies suggest that this may be because if you lack the gene you cannot retain any sulforaphane inside your body, it is all excreted within a few hours. However, if you consume larger portions of broccoli, or broccoli with higher levels of sulforaphane, such as the ‘super broccoli’, you may be able to retain as much sulforaphane in your body as those who have the gene. Eating larger portions may have additional benefits since broccoli is also a rich source of other vitamins and minerals”.

Read more at Institute of Food Research…

First, Johnson and Johnson became smitten with Guidant. Unfortunately, it turns out she wasn’t the most virginal of brides, what with some faulty products and all. Cold-footed J&J tried to squirm out of the deal. Guidant threatened to bear it’s legal teeth should J&J actually leave her standing, so J&J decided to come through with a revised offer. Just when we thought we were through covering the issue, Boston Scientific comes out of nowhere:

Boston Scientific made an unexpected $25 billion takeover offer Monday for the troubled medical device maker Guidant, more than $3 billion more than what Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay for Guidant last month.
Boston Scientific said it was prepared to sell Guidant’s stent business to satisfy regulators but wanted to retain some shared rights in Guidant’s drug-eluting stent program, which has not yet brought a product to market. Boston Scientific has one of the bestselling drug-eluting stents on the market in Taxus, which competes with the Cypher stent made by J&J’s Cordis Corp. unit.
Boston Scientific, which makes heart devices, offered in a letter to Guidant’s chairman to pay a combination of cash and stock worth about $72 per Guidant share. It said that is nearly 14 percent above Friday’s value of J&J’s revised cash-and-stock deal for Guidant.
The offer comes nearly a year after J&J said it would buy the Indianapolis medical-device maker for $25.4 billion. But J&J cut its offer by nearly $4 billion after a series of product recalls by Guidant, and Guidant management accepted the lower price last month.
Boston Scientific executives said the prospect of entering the lucrative $10 billion market for implantable pacemakers and defibrillators by purchasing Guidant outweighs the legal risks posed by Guidant’s recent problems.
“We understand there have been some recent issues, but we believe they are manageable,” Boston Scientific Chief Operating Officer Paul LaViolette said in an interview with The Associated Press.

How cute, Boston Scientific is willing to see past Guidant’s mistakes to the true beauty underneath. What does J&J think of this intrusion?

A Johnson & Johnson spokesman did not return three calls seeking comment Monday.

More from the Associate Press article, via the Miami Herald…
More from Guidant, and Boston Scientific…

New research from the Argonne National Laboratory has confirmed that lead (plumbum) contamination was the cause of Beethoven’s ailment. This is how the research was conducted:

The bone fragments, confirmed by DNA testing to have come from Beethoven’s body, were scanned by X-rays from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, which provides the most brilliant X-rays in the Western Hemisphere. A control bone fragment sample from the same historic period was also examined. Both bone fragments were from the parietal section – the top – of the skull.
“The testing indicated large amounts of lead in the Beethoven bone sample, compared to the control,” said Bill Walsh, chief scientist at the Pfeiffer Treatment Center in Warrenville, Ill., and director of the Beethoven Research Project.
The bone fragment is the property of Paul Kaufman, a California businessman who inherited the relics through other family members from his great-great uncle, an Austrian doctor. Not sure if the fragment was actually from the composer, Kaufman sent it to the University of Muenster in Germany for mitochondrial DNA comparison with the samples of Beethoven’s hair, owned by the Beethoven Society and also analyzed by Walsh and his colleagues at the Advanced Photon Source.
The findings confirm the earlier work done on the hair samples. In addition, the researchers found no detectable levels of either cadmium or mercury – both considered possibilities for causing Beethoven’s illness – in either the bone fragment or the hair.
“The finding of elevated lead in Beethoven’s skull, along with DNA results indicating authenticity of the bone/hair relics, provides solid evidence that Beethoven suffered from a toxic overload of lead,” Walsh said. “In addition, the presence of lead in the skull suggests that his exposure to lead was not a recent event, but may have been present for many years.”
The half life of lead in the human body is about 22 years, with 95 percent of “old” lead residing in the skeletal structure. Beethoven experienced a change of personality and abdominal illness in his late teens and early 20s that persisted throughout his adult life. His abdominal symptoms and autopsy findings are both consistent with lead poisoning, Walsh said.
There have been documented cases of deafness resulting from lead poisoning, but this has been a relatively rare occurrence. There is no solid evidence that lead poisoning was a cause of Beethoven’s deafness, Walsh said.
“Beethoven saw physician after physician in search of a cure for his physical ailments,” said Walsh. In fact, in a letter to a friend, he expressed the wish that after his death, researchers would use his remains to help determine the cause of his illness so that others would not have to suffer as he did. “Beethoven suffered from bad digestion, chronic abdominal pain, irritability and depression. Since he died in 1827 at age 57, there has been much speculation but no proof of the cause of his illnesses and death.”
Researchers performed the elemental X-ray fluorescence analysis at an Advanced Photon Source X-ray Operations and Research beamline.
“The APS is the only machine in the country where we can perform the research in this detail,” said Ken Kemner, one of the Argonne researchers involved in the project. The group used microimaging to look at the distribution of lead in and on both the bone fragment and the hair to identify the presence of any surface effects and to determine the timeline of the lead exposure.

The press release…