WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy -- starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.

Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman's team has been working to perfect for 20 years. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, his colleagues say they developed a formulation that works as a pill, without side-effects.

They have licensed it to SynDevRx, Inc, a privately held Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company that has recruited several prominent cancer experts to its board.

Tests in mice showed it worked against a range of tumors, including breast cancer, neuroblastoma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, brain tumors known as glioblastomas and uterine tumors.

It helped stop so-called primary tumors and also prevented their spread, Ofra Benny of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School and colleagues reported.

"Using the oral route of administration, it first reaches the liver, making it especially efficient in preventing the development of liver metastasis in mice," they wrote in their report. "Liver metastasis is very common in many tumor types and is often associated with a poor prognosis and survival rate," they added.

'ALMOST CLEAN' LIVERS

"When I looked at the livers of the mice, the treated group was almost clean," Benny said in a statement. "In the control group you couldn't recognize the livers -- they were a mass of tumors."

The drug was known experimentally as TNP-470, and was originally isolated from a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus fresenius.

Harvards's Donald Ingber discovered the fungus by accident while trying to grow endothelial cells -- the cells that line blood vessels. The mold affected the cells in a way known to prevent the growth of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries.

Ingber and Folkman developed TNP-470 with the help of Takeda Chemical Industries in Japan in 1990.

But the drug affected the brain, causing depression, dizziness and other side-effects. It also did not stay in the body long and required constant infusions. The lab dropped it.

Efforts to improve it did not work well. Then Benny and colleagues tried nanotechnology, attaching two "pom-pom"-shaped polymers to TNP-470, protecting it from stomach acid.

In mice, the altered drug, now named lodamin, went straight to tumor cells and helped suppress melanoma and lung cancer, with no apparent side effects, Benny said.

All untreated mice had fluid in the abdominal cavity, and enlarged livers covered with tumors. Mice treated with lodamin had normal-looking livers and spleens, the researchers said.

Twenty days after being injected with cancer cells, four out of seven untreated mice had died, while all treated mice were still alive, Benny's team reported.

"I had never expected such a strong effect on these aggressive tumor models," she said. The researchers believe lodamin may also be useful in other diseases marked by abnormal blood vessel growth, such as age-related macular degeneration.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 16 (HealthDay News) -- A new genetic test that helps assess the risk of tumor recurrence and long-term survival for patients with relatively high-risk breast cancer has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The TOP2A/FISH pharmDx is the first approved device to test for the TOP2A (topoisomerase 2 alpha) gene in cancer patients. The gene plays a role in DNA replication. Changes in the TOP2A gene in breast cancer cells indicate increased risk that a tumor will recur or decreased survival.

The new test, made by Dako Denmark A/S, uses fluorescently-labeled DNA probes to detect or confirm gene or chromosome abnormalities, a process called fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH).

The FDA approval was based on a study of 767 high-risk patients in Denmark who had been treated with chemotherapy after removal of a breast tumor. The findings indicated the test was useful in estimating cancer recurrence and overall survival.

"When used with other clinical information and laboratory tests, this test can provide health care professionals with additional insights on the likely clinical course for breast cancer patients," Dr. Daniel Schultz, director of the FDA's Center for Clinical Devices and Radiological Health, said in a prepared statement.

CHICAGO - Freezing tumors may help relieve the extreme pain of cancer that has spread to the bone, which is often untouched by narcotics or radiation, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

This freezing process, called cryoablation, is often used to destroy kidney, prostate and other tumors, but researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found it eased cancer pain in 80 percent of patients in a small study, and the effect lasted for up to six months.

About 100,000 people in the United States each year have cancer that metastasizes, or spreads, to the bones. Radiation therapy is the most common treatment for localized pain in metastatic cancer.

ORLANDO, Fla. - In an ideal world, every heart attack would end like Willard "Ziggy" Hill's. Within 90 minutes of arriving at a small community hospital in North Carolina, he was having a blocked artery reopened at Duke University Medical Center 25 miles away.

"It was like being a car in a pit stop at NASCAR," he said. "I thought 'I am in really good hands.'"

Two years ago, he might not have been. North Carolina was a bad place to have a heart attack, scoring below national norms of fast care. Now it may be one of the best.

The reason is the nation's most ambitious statewide project to redo how serious heart attacks are handled. Paramedics, doctors and 65 hospitals put aside powerful individual interests like money and control, and focused on giving faster care.

Why is this important? Drugs, devices and doctors do no good if they do not reach people quickly, before the heart suffers permanent damage.

Heart attacks happen when arteries are blocked, crimping a critical blood supply. The first choice of treatment is angioplasty, in which a tiny balloon is pushed into the vessel and inflated to flatten the clog.

However, many small hospitals lack specialized suites called catheterization labs needed for angioplasties. Instead, they sometimes give clot-dissolving drugs, which do not always work.

In the North Carolina project, 55 small hospitals agreed to send appropriate patients to 10 larger ones for angioplasty, even though it meant giving up thousands of dollars of revenue.

"If this is your Aunt Bess and she comes in to your emergency department and you offer her a level of care that's not the best, and you have to go to that funeral in that small community, that's what they think about — not cost," said Mayme Roettig, the nurse who coordinated the project.

Big hospitals also had room to improve, too, said Dr. Christopher Granger, the Duke cardiologist who led the project.

Statewide, "up to 40 percent who should get clot-busting drugs or angioplasty were not getting it, and when it was being given it was being given too slowly," he said.

He reported one-year results of the project Sunday at an American Heart Association meeting in Florida. They also were published online by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers compared the care of more than 2,000 patients before and after the project and found:

_More patients got care at top-tier heart hospitals, and more quickly than similar patients did before the project began. Helicopter transfers rose, and more paramedics diagnosed heart attacks from EKGs done in ambulances.

_The number of patients receiving angioplasty rose, and the portion of eligible patients not receiving artery-opening procedures dropped.

_Every single measure of time improved. Examples: the average time it took a small hospital to evaluate and refer patients to a larger one dropped from two hours to 71 minutes; average transfer times plunged more than half an hour.

"They did a magnificent job," said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a Yale University cardiologist who is leading a national campaign to speed up heart attack care.

"This is a great example of where people in a state got together and said 'Gee, if I were a patient, what's the kind of care that I would want, and how can we deliver that?'"

The stories from North Carolina are dramatic.

Paramedics like 26-year-old Joshua Codispoti in rural Person County made judgment calls previously left to cardiologists. Last spring, he did an EKG in an ambulance, diagnosed a heart attack in a healthy-looking man in his 30s, and called a hotline to summon a team of specialists and ready a $2 million cath lab (Duke has eight) for angioplasty.

The team must be in the lab within 30 minutes, and the large hospitals must agree to take heart attack patients regardless of whether they have an open bed, said Duke cardiologist Dr. James Jollis.

Codispoti's patient was quickly evaluated at 50-bed Person Memorial Hospital and sent on to Duke. "I don't feel like we're giving up anything" by referring people for advanced care, said emergency room physician Dr. Kimberly Yarborough.

She hasn't given clot-dissolving drugs to a heart attack patient in nearly two years, since the project started.

Neighboring states also have benefited. Howard Campbell, 65, suffered a heart attack in May at his Lake Gaston home just across the Virginia-North Carolina state line.

"I was on my rec room floor having a heart attack at 1:30, and at 2:20 I was on a helicopter to Duke," he said.

When his wife arrived at 3:30, his procedure was already done.

"It was like we had rehearsed it — it just went so smoothly." Campbell said.

The project was funded by the hospitals, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, and the Doris Duke Foundation, which helped equip ambulances with EKGs. Doctors hope to expand it to the 35 state hospitals not currently participating.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 hospitals have joined a nationwide campaign that began a year ago to have hospitals give angioplasty treatment faster. Less than a third of patients get it within the recommended 90 minutes of arrival, and the risk of dying goes up 42 percent if care is delayed even half an hour longer.

"This has been a pretty spectacular effort," Krumholz said. "If you can get people in really quickly, you can almost abort the heart attack. It's such a different mindset than a few years ago when everybody said 'we're busy, we're doing the best we can.'"

Doctors will report first-year results early next year.

___

Gaining weight can raise breast cancer risk

Estrogen can accumulate in stored fat; may cause tumor growth

Updated: 9:48 a.m. PT Oct 23, 2007

CHICAGO - Women who put on a lot of weight at any stage of adulthood increase their risk of breast cancer, likely because the hormone estrogen accumulates in the acquired fat and promotes tumors, researchers said on Monday.

Women who became overweight or obese had 1.4 times the risk of breast cancer compared to women whose weight remained stable or declined, their study found.

"The present findings indicate that the relations of adult weight gain to breast cancer is evident throughout the entire adulthood life span rather than being limited to a specific time in life," Jiyoung Ahn of the U.S. National Cancer Institute wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

STROKE: Remember The 1st Three Letters...S.T.R.

5-year survival rates have increased for whites, but not blacks, study finds
Updated: 1:11 p.m. PT Sept 7, 2007

NEW YORK - There are disparities in the treatment and outcome between older black and white patients who have renal cell cancer, with blacks having significantly lower survival rates, according to a new study.

However, the lower rates of nephrectomy (surgical removal of the kidney) and the higher rates of comorbid illnesses in black patients largely explain the survival difference, the study found.

In recent years, 5-year survival rates for renal cell cancer have improved among whites, the authors explain in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, but there has been little change in survival rates among blacks.

Dr. Sonja I. Berndt from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and colleagues examined data for 964 black and 10,482 white Medicare beneficiaries with renal cell cancer.

Blacks were much more likely than whites to have other illnesses, in addition to kidney cancer, the authors found.

Far fewer black patients (61 percent) than white patients (70 percent) underwent surgery to remove the kidney, the report indicates. Blacks were still less likely than whites to undergo surgery after adjustment for a number of factors.

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Blacks survived a median of 2.5 years, while whites survived a median of 3.2 years, the investigators report, but this difference was eliminated when they adjusted for other illnesses present in blacks and treatment type.

Among blacks who had their kidney removed, the survival rates were worse compared with those for whites who had their kidney removed. In contrast, blacks who did not have kidney removal surgery had better survival rates than whites who did not have the surgery.

“Although the reasons for the disparity in treatment are not entirely clear and need to be examined in future studies,” the authors conclude, “this study suggests black patients may benefit from efforts to improve the availability of health care and interventions to reduce comorbid illness.”

Copyright 2007