Pink Fling Supporting the WISH Fund at Carroll Hospital Center

Each year in October, Carroll Hospital Center hosts an inspirational afternoon in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

This year’s luncheon will be held:
Sunday, October 24, 2010
11:30 a.m. Silent Auction Opens
Noon Lunch
Piney Branch Golf & Country Club
5301 Trenton Mill Road
Hampstead, Maryland 21074

Click here for sponsorship opportunities and to purchase tickets

Keynote presentation: Writing to Survive Another Day Marcia Talley is the multi-award-winning author of nine Hannah Ives mysteries, from SING IT TO HER BONES (1999) to ALL THINGS UNDYING (2010). She is editor/contributor to NAKED CAME THE PHOENIX and I’D KILL FOR THAT. Her prize-winning short stories appear in more than a dozen collections.

Call 410-871-6200 for more information

Jewelry Artist Andi Vogel is proud to donate her RocknBauble Breast Cancer Awareness Jewelry for this special event. Andi and RocknBauble support many awareness causes through Awareness Jewelry and donations from a percentage of the proceeds of her awareness jewelry sales. The RocknBauble Awareness Jewelry has been showcased world wide at many awareness events throughout the years. Find out more about Andi and her high quality awareness jewelry on her home page or Etsy Shop.

RocknBauble Home Page
RocknBauble Etsy Shop

Entertainer Snoop Dogg Talks to Hip Hollywood about his Support of Breast Cancer Awareness at a Past Fund Raiser – Video

Research will Help Develop Simple Blood Test for Early Detection

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Researchers at the University of Arkansas are building a library of synthetically produced antibodies that can detect and rapidly validate proteins secreted by breast cancer cells. Their work will accelerate the process of developing a simple blood test for early detection of breast cancer.

“We want to implement a rapid screen that is sensitive – meaning highly accurate – non-invasive and inexpensive,” said Shannon Servoss, assistant professor of chemical engineering. “Such a test would be easy to use – as easy as a pregnancy test – and applicable to women of all ages, races and ethnicities. The ultimate goal, of course, is early detection of breast cancer.”

Researchers currently use specific protein binders called affinity reagents, which are molecules that interact with proteins, to recognize and validate proteins that indicate breast cancer. But this process is tedious and problematic because there are a limited number of affinity reagents available, and techniques to develop them are slow and expensive.

Servoss’s team seeks to overcome these obstacles by developing a collection of affitoids, which are synthetic, peptoid-based affinity reagents. A library of these affitoids, which are inexpensive and easy to make, will facilitate the development of techniques for protein validation.

The affitoids have other advantages. They can be designed to have desired properties, such as structural stability and specificity for a single protein. They also do not have to be limited to breast cancer detection. They could be designed to detect other complex diseases.

“This technique is superior to those currently available because affitoids specific for proteins secreted by breast cancer cells can be rapidly selected from a large collection, which isn’t too expensive to build,” Servoss said. “The selected affitoids will be used to determine a profile – a protein fingerprint – that indicates breast cancer. Of course, all of this is happening at the cell level, before the tumor is detectable.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year more than 40,000 women die due to breast cancer, and approximately 200,000 women are diagnosed with the disease. Early diagnosis leads to decreased mortality rates and allows for many more treatment options.

“It is imaginable that in this generation, a simple blood test could detect breast cancer at early stages and save thousands of lives,” Servoss said. (source newswire.uark.edu)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been selected by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to host one of 11 new Centers for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB). Under this grant, Berkeley Lab expects to receive about $13.5 million over the next five years to develop computational models that predict breast cancer responses to therapeutic agents.

“We’re proud to have been selected by NCI to be a part of its effort to study cancer as a systemic disease, an effort we feel is critical to the future of cancer research,” said Joe Gray, director of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division and co-director of the new CCSB at Berkeley. “Our work will help advance the development of breast cancer diagnostic and therapeutic strategies that are effective and durable.”

Renowned cancer researcher Joe Gray will co-direct a new Center for Cancer Systems Biology hosted at Berkeley Lab and funded by the National Cancer Institute. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

Renowned cancer researcher Joe Gray will co-direct a new Center for Cancer Systems Biology hosted at Berkeley Lab and funded by the National Cancer Institute. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

Gray, a renowned cancer researcher, holds a joint appointment with the University of California (UC) San Francisco, where he is an adjunct professor of laboratory medicine and co-leader of the breast cancer oncology program at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He will co-direct the new NCI CCSB with Claire Tomlin of UC Berkeley, where she is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences. Tomlin is a leading authority on the theory and design of models that predict the behavior of complex systems.

Traditional cancer research has concentrated on the identification and functional characterization of molecular defects. However, modern genomic analysis technologies show that individual cancers may involve  the deregulation of hundreds to thousands of interacting genes. Consequently, within the cancer research community there is a move to treat cancer as a “systems biology” or network disease, in which breakdowns in regulatory molecular networks disrupt the normal restraints on a cell’s growth and behavior. That the exact details of these networks often vary between clinically similar cancers helps explain why some patients will respond favorably to a specific cancer drug while others won’t.  In addition, the nature of these regulatory networks is such that they tend to resist therapeutic interventions.

“Research at our CCSB will focus on development of experimentally validated computational models that predict the responses of ductal breast cancers to the growing number of therapeutic agents that target aberrant receptor tyrosine kinase signaling,” Gray said.

Receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) are enzymes that form central components of cell signaling networks. They’ve been shown not only to be key regulators of normal cellular processes but to also have a critical role in the development and progression of many forms of cancer, including breast cancer.

Said Gray, “Despite the growing availability of a broad range of RTK network-targeted drugs responses vary substantially between patients and are often not durable. Our premise is that development of optimal RTK network-targeted drug combinations will require experimentally validated, computational models of the diverse resistance and response mechanisms that are specific to cancer subtypes and allow drug combinations to be tested in silico so that the most promising can be prioritized for clinical evaluation.”

In addition to researchers from Berkeley Lab and the UC campuses of Berkeley and San Francisco, the new CCBS at Berkeley will also involve participants from the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Experimental aspects of the research will be carried out at Berkely Lab and UC San Francisco, while computational work will be conducted at all the participating institutions. Principal investigators will include Berkeley Lab’s Paul Spellman, Michael Korn of UCSF, Gordon Mills at MD Anderson, and Sach Mukherjee in England.

The CCBS hosted at Berkeley Lab and those at the other ten nationwide host sites are part of the Integrative Cancer Biology Program (ICBP), the primary sponsor of NCI’s cancer systems biology research.

Said ICBP director Dan Gallahan, “These centers represent a unique multidisciplinary union of outstanding scientists and clinicians who will work to unravel the complexities of cancer through the novel application of technology and mathematical modeling. Their discoveries and models will be critical to our continued success in understanding and treating cancer disease.”

Added NCI director John E. Niederhuber, M.D., “This program is part of the next generation of cancer research, in that it will approach the disease from a holistic or comprehensive viewpoint in order to understand how all of the components of the disease fit together.”

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov.

Additional Information

For more information about the research of Joe Gray visit his Website at  http://www.lbl.gov/lsd/People_&_Organization/Scientific_Staff_Directory/Gray_Lab.html

For more information about the National Cancer Institute’s Integrative Cancer Biology Program visit the Website at http://icbp.nci.nih.gov/

UF Researchers Find Cancer-fighting Properties in Papaya Tea

The humble papaya is gaining credibility in Western medicine for anticancer powers that folk cultures have recognized for generations.

papaya tea

University of Florida researcher Nam Dang, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues in Japan have documented papaya’s dramatic anticancer effect against a broad range of lab-grown tumors, including cancers of the cervix, breast, liver, lung and pancreas. The researchers used an extract made from dried papaya leaves, and the anticancer effects were stronger when cells received larger doses of the tea.

In a paper published in the Feb. 17 issue of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Dang and his colleagues also documented for the first time that papaya leaf extract boosts the production of key signaling molecules called Th1-type cytokines. This regulation of the immune system, in addition to papaya’s direct antitumor effect on various cancers, suggests possible therapeutic strategies that use the immune system to fight cancers.

The papaya extract did not have any toxic effects on normal cells, avoiding a common and devastating consequence of many cancer therapy regimens. The success of the papaya extract in acting on cancer without toxicity is consistent with reports from indigenous populations in Australia and his native Vietnam, said Dang, a professor of medicine and medical director of the UF Shands Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office.

“Based on what I have seen and heard in a clinical setting, nobody who takes this extract experiences demonstrable toxicity; it seems like you could take it for a long time — as long as it is effective,” he said.

Researchers exposed 10 different types of cancer cell cultures to four strengths of papaya leaf extract and measured the effect after 24 hours. Papaya slowed the growth of tumors in all the cultures.

To identify the mechanism by which papaya checked the growth of the cultures, the team focused on a cell line for T lymphoma. Their results suggested that at least one of the mechanisms employed by the papaya extract is inducing cell death.

In a similar analysis, the team also looked at the effect of papaya extract on the production of antitumor molecules known as cytokines. Papaya was shown to promote the production of Th1-type cytokines, important in the regulation of the immune system. For that reason, the study findings raise the possibility of future use of papaya extract components in immune-related conditions such as inflammation, autoimmune disease and some cancers.

Bharat B. Aggarwal, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, already is so convinced of papaya’s restorative powers that he has a serving of the fruit every day.

“We have always known that papaya has a lot of interesting things in there,” said Aggarwal, a professor in the center’s department of experimental therapeutics who was not involved in the UF research. Foremost among papaya’s health-promoting agents is papain, papaya’s signature enzyme, which is found in both the fruit and the leaves.

“This paper has not gone too much into identifying the components responsible for the activity, which is just fine. I think that is a good beginning,” Aggarwal said.

Aggarwal also noted that papaya extract’s success in reducing cancer in laboratory cell cultures must next be replicated in animal and human studies.

“I hope Dr. Dang takes it further, because I think we need enthusiastic people like him to move it forward,” Aggarwal said.

Dang and a colleague have applied to patent the process to distill the papaya extract through the University of Tokyo; the next step in the research is to identify the specific compounds in the papaya extract active against the cancer cell lines. For this stage, Dang has partnered with Hendrick Luesch, Ph.D., a fellow UF Shands Cancer Center member and a professor of medicinal chemistry. Luesch is an expert in the identification and synthesis of natural products for medicinal purposes, and recently discovered a coral reef compound that inhibits cancer cell growth in cell lines.

from their “our mission” page
The mission of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation is to achieve prevention and a cure for breast cancer in our lifetime by providing critical funding for innovative clinical and translational research at leading medical centers worldwide, and increasing public awareness about good breast health. A minimum of 85 cents of every dollar goes to research and awareness programs. (source /bcrfcure.org)

From the Page: About the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF)

NBCF is committed to spreading knowledge and fostering hope in the fight against breast cancer. By funding free mammograms for women who could otherwise not afford them and supporting research programs in leading facilities across the country, NBCF helps inspire the courage needed to win this monumental battle. Be a part of the solution and discover how to help. (source www.nationalbreastcancer.org)

Trials Offer Hope to People with Breast and Ovarian Cancer

Scientists in Birmingham are running one of the first UK trials of a new drug offering hope to people suffering hereditary forms of both breast and ovarian cancer.

The Cancer Research UK clinical trial is open to patients who have already developed an advanced form of breast or ovarian cancer and have been diagnosed with faults in the known cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1 or BRCA2.

The patients on the phase II trial are receiving a potent anti-cancer drugs known as PARP inhibitors.

Dr Daniel Rea, who is running the trial at the Cancer Research UK Centre in Birmingham, said: “People who inherit faults in these genes have a 50-80 per cent chance of developing cancer.

“Currently people with hereditary forms of breast and ovarian cancer are treated in the same way as every other patient who develops advanced stage disease. We hope this trial will show that by using the PARP inhibitor we can offer them more targeted, effective treatment.”

Mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes are responsible for around five per cent of the 45,500 cases of breast cancer diagnosed annually in the UK and for more than five percent of the 6,615 cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed each year.

If this trial is successful in the long-term, the researchers believe this treatment could offer hope for the future by paving the way for the drug to be used as a preventative treatment.

Dr Nigel Blackburn, Cancer Research UK’s director of drug development – whose team are managing the trial, said: “There is a huge amount of interest in the potential for PARP inhibitors and Cancer Research UK is proud to have pioneered research into this class of drug.”

The phase II trial is now open and is likely to take 18 months to complete. Researchers are aiming to recruit 56 patients.

For more information visit Cancer Research UK’s patient information website www.cancerhelp.org.uk

From the Who We Are Page at Cancer Help Dot Org Uk:

About Cancer Research UK

A scientist working in a laboratory Key facts about Cancer Research UK Cancer Research UK launched in February 2002 following the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and Imperial Cancer Research Fund. We are the world’s leading independent organisation dedicated to cancer research. The charity supports research into all aspects of cancer through the work of more than 4,500 scientists, doctors and nurses. Cancer Research UK is the European leader in the development of novel anti-cancer treatments. We are training the next generation of cancer scientists and doctors. Cancer Research UK employs its own scientists as well as supporting grant-funded researchers based in UK universities, hospitals and institutes. We support research in more than 35 towns across the UK. All the research we support is subject to stringent peer review by external specialists in the relevant fields.

JAX, FL – The Taylor Morrison team recently took to the streets to fight breast cancer during the American Cancer Society’s 11th Annual Making Strides against Breast Cancer 5K walk in San Marco. The team, known as “Linda’s Golden Souls,” walked to honor Linda Bisset, a Taylor Morrison new home sales associate who is currently undergoing treatment to fight breast cancer. The team raised more than $1,000 for the American Cancer Society.

Making Strides Against Breast Cancer is an annual event that provides an opportunity to honor breast cancer survivors, educate women about prevention and early detection, and raise funds and awareness to help the American Cancer Society achieve a day without breast cancer. In 2008, supporters raised more than $60 million nationwide to help the American Cancer Society continue fighting breast cancer and offer hope to people facing the disease.