Saturday, 8 June 2013
News
FDA approves two drugs, companion diagnostic test for advanced skin cancer
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved two new drugs, Tafinlar (dabrafenib) and Mekinist (trametinib), for patients with advanced (metastatic) or unresectable (cannot be removed by surgery) melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer.
Ref http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm354199
Editoral on current colorectal screening- June, The lancet Oncology
Screening for pre cancerous polyps maybe one reason why incidence and mortality of colorectal cancer is decreasing. Howvever the lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is only about 5%, "suggests that not all adenomas become cancer, but present techniques cannot reliably predict which polyps will progress and which will regress or remain stable". Pickhardt et al (2013) in same issue, suggest that a volumetric growth characteristic can be used to predict the growth rate of polyps thus if found to be quick growing the patient can proceed to the next clinical stage of treatment, if slow glowing a active monitoring apporaoch can be used. HOwever questions need to be considered in that do these slow growing polps stop or do they flucutate? If these polpys defined as slow growing later become an issue, is delayed removal benefical? The second question relates to the generalisability of these findings to a larger screening population. THis later question regards the rate of patient accural to the CT study done by Pickhardt et al.
Thus this editoral of the paper by Pickhardt et al (2013), show that using CT clonoscopy one could personalise medical treatment in preferance to the charactertics of the cellular morphology.
ref- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470204513702523
orginal article,
Perry J Pickhardt, David H Kim, B Dustin Pooler, J Louis Hinshaw, Duncan Barlow, Don Jensen, Mark Reichelderfer, Brooks D Cash, Assessment of volumetric growth rates of small colorectal polyps with CT colonography: a longitudinal study of natural history, The Lancet Oncology, Available online 7 June 2013, ISSN 1470-2045, 10.1016/S1470-2045(13)70216-X.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147020451370216X)
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