Posts Tagged ‘history of prostate cancer’

Opening Ceremony and Award Presentations from the 2015 AACR Meeting in Philadelphia PA

Posted in Academic Publishing, Cancer and Current Therapeutics, CANCER BIOLOGY & Innovations in Cancer Therapy, Cancer Prevention: Research & Programs, Conference Coverage with Social Media, Interviews with Scientific Leaders, tagged AACR, androgen receptor, breast cancer, Cancer - General, Food and Drug Administration, health, History of Medicine, history of prostate cancer, history of science, PSA, psa screening, research, science, skin cancer on April 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Opening Ceremony and Award Presentations from the 2015 AACR Meeting in Philadelphia PA; Pennsylvania Convention Center, Sunday April 19, 2015: 8:15 AM

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

The following contain notes from the Sunday April 19, 2015 AACR Meeting (Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia PA) 8:15 AM Opening Ceremony and Awards Presentation

Ninth Annual AACR Team Science Award

Recipient: Designing Androgen Receptor (AR) Inhibitor Team

The Designing AR Inhibitors Team is a multi-institutional team that is composed of Charles Sawyers, MD, PhD, team leader, director of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, AACR past-president, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; Howard Scher, MD, chief of genitourinary oncology service and D. Wayne Calloway chair in urologic oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering; and Michael Jung, PhD, distinguished professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the UCLA.

The team was honored for their collective work in discovering and developing the novel antiandrogen enzalutamide (Xtandi) for the treatment of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer in a collaboration that started ten years ago.

Twelfth Annual AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research

Recipient: Mario R. Capecchi, Ph.D.

Dr. Capecchi is a geneticist who won the Nobel prize for creating technologies that resulted in the first knockout mouse. For this work, Capecchi won the 2007 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, along with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies, who also contributed.

AACR Distinguished Public Service Award

Recipient : Miri Ziv Director General of Israel Cancer

Instrumental in getting national Israeli mammography screening
Efforts led to national skin cancer screening program in Israel
Prevention/control programs
In 1995 representative to European Breast League

Ninth Annual AACR Margaret Foti Award for Leadership and Extraordinary Achievements in Cancer Research

Recipient: Donald S. Coffey, Ph.D.

Dr. Coffey discovered the nuclear matrix and made pivotal discoveries understanding the process of DNA synthesis. He is the leader of the National Prostate Coalition and efforts led to the development of the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) as a prostate cancer biomarker. Now his lab is assessing the role of chaos, fractals and complexity in the self-organization of DNA, cells and tissue in relation to tumor biology.

In a side note, both Dr. Foti and Dr. Coffey had the same mentor, Dr. Sydney Weinhouse and Professor Leslie Helleman, who both studied the oxidation of free fatty acids and took Otto Warburg’s hypothesis a step further to understand how more complex cancer metabolism was than Otto had imagined.

Other award winners were:

Dr. Richard Pasdur of the FDA who won the Public Service Award

In memorial

Dr. Upton (M.D.) pathologist head of NCI and established EPA

Dr. Emmanuel Farber, M.D., Ph.D. – biology of tobacco control and issued the historical Surgeon

General’s report on smoking

Dr. June Biedler, Ph.D. – showed multidrug resistance and defined cytogenetics of neuroblastoma

New clinical results supports Imaging-guidance for targeted prostate biopsy

Posted in Bio Instrumentation in Experimental Life Sciences Research, CANCER BIOLOGY & Innovations in Cancer Therapy, Imaging-based Cancer Patient Management, Personalized and Precision Medicine & Genomic Research, Uncategorized, tagged health, history of prostate cancer, imaging guided biopsies, medicine, MRI - US image fusion, Prostate, Prostate cancer, prostate ultrasound, PSA, psa density, psa family, random biopsy, science, TRUS, ultrasound on December 16, 2012| 9 Comments »

New clinical results supports Imaging-guidance for targeted prostate biopsy

Author and Curator: Dror Nir, PhD

Last week, I came across an interesting abstract related to work that is carried-out in UCLA for several years now by Prof. Lenny Marks. Lenny participated to the development of “Artemis”. Artemis is a system that is adjunct to ultrasound and performs 3D Imaging and Navigation for Prostate Biopsy by Eigen. I thought that this deserves a complementary post to Imaging-guided biopsies: Is there a preferred strategy to choose? which I posted few weeks ago

Artemis

When men present with risk parameters for harboring prostate cancer, they are advised to undergo a transrectal ultrasound guided prostate biopsy (TRUS biopsy). Over one million biopsies are carried out in the USA ever year.

The indications for a prostate biopsy in the USA are:

· Raised PSA above 2.5ng/ml

· Raised age-specific PSA

· Family history of prostate cancer

· High PSA density > 0.15ng/ml/cc

· High PSA velocity> 0.75 ng/ml/year or doubling time <3 years

· Abnormal digital rectal examination

Overall, men undergoing systematic trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) guided biopsy of 12 cores of prostatic tissue have approximately 1 in 4 probability of being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Of these, about half are diagnosed with low risk disease. A known problem with the current practice of TRUS biopsy, is that it is performed blind – the operator does not know where the cancer is. Therefore, many low risk cancers that do not need treating are detected and many high risk cancers are missed or incorrectly classified.

The abstract below is reporting the results of a clinical study, aimed to evaluate the potential added value in using Artemis and ultrasound-MRI image fusion when performing TRUS biopsies, as a method and system to allow urologists to progress from blind biopsies to biopsies, which are mapped, targeted and tracked.

Image fusion is the process of combining multiple images from various sources into a single representative image. Ultrasound is the imaging modality used to guide Artemis in performing the biopsies. In this study MRI is used to overcome the “blindness” regarding tumor location. More on MRI’s cancer detection reliability can be found in my posts Imaging-guided biopsies: Is there a preferred strategy to choose? and Today’s fundamental challenge in Prostate cancer screening.

Source

Curr Opin Urol. 2013 Jan;23(1):43-50. doi: 10.1097/MOU.0b013e32835ad3ee.

MRI-ultrasound fusion for guidance of targeted prostate biopsy.

Marks L, Young S, Natarajan S. Department of Urology, David Geffen School of Medicine bCenter for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA.

Abstract

PURPOSE OF REVIEW:

Prostate cancer (CaP) may be detected on MRI. Fusion of MRI with ultrasound allows urologists to progress from blind, systematic biopsies to biopsies, which are mapped, targeted and tracked. We herein review the current status of prostate biopsy via MRI/ultrasound fusion.

RECENT FINDINGS:

Three methods of fusing MRI for targeted biopsy have been recently described: MRI-ultrasound fusion, MRI-MRI fusion (‘in-bore’ biopsy) and cognitive fusion. Supportive data are emerging for the fusion devices, two of which received US Food and Drug Administration approval in the past 5 years: Artemis (Eigen, USA) and Urostation (Koelis, France). Working with the Artemis device in more than 600 individuals, we found that targeted biopsies are two to three times more sensitive for detection of CaP than nontargeted systematic biopsies; nearly 40% of men with Gleason score of at least 7 CaP are diagnosed only by targeted biopsy; nearly 100% of men with highly suspicious MRI lesions are diagnosed with CaP; ability to return to a prior biopsy site is highly accurate (within 1.2 ± 1.1 mm); and targeted and systematic biopsies are twice as accurate as systematic biopsies alone in predicting whole-organ disease.

SUMMARY:

In the future, MRI-ultrasound fusion for lesion targeting is likely to result in fewer and more accurate prostate biopsies than the present use of systematic biopsies with ultrasound guidance alone.

Written by: Dror Nir, PhD.