Archive for January, 2010

CHICAGO, IL – A researcher from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has invented a novel way to halt and even reverse rheumatoid arthritis. He developed an imitation of a suicide molecule that floats undetected into overactive immune cells responsible for the disease.

Whimsically referred to as Casper the Ghost, the stealthy molecule causes the immune cells to self-destruct.
The approach, tested on mice, doesn’t carry the health risks of current treatments.

“This new therapy stopped the disease cold in 75 percent of the mice,” reported Harris Perlman, the lead author and an associate professor of medicine at Feinberg. “The best part was we didn’t see any toxicity. This has a lot of potential for creating an entirely new treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.”

The study will be published in a recent issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism.

Healthy immune cells are supposed to die after they attack an invading virus or bacteria. But in rheumatoid arthritis, the immune cells called macrophages live and go rogue. They proliferate in the blood, build up in the joints and invade cartilage and bone. Currently, there is no effective, nontoxic way to stop them. Perlman discovered that immune cells in rheumatoid arthritis are low in a critical molecule called Bim, whose job is to order the cells to self-destruct. To correct that shortage, Perlman developed an imitation of the molecule, called BH3 mimetic. When Harris injected his drug into mice with rheumatoid arthritis, it floated ghostlike into their macrophages and bam!, the misbehaving immune cells self destructed.

In his research, Harris showed the molecule could prevent the development of rheumatoid arthritis as well as trigger a remission of existing disease. After the drug was injected in animals with the disease, joint swelling was reduced and bone destruction decreased.

Current treatments for rheumatoid arthritis include low-level chemotherapy and steroids. These are not always effective, however, and they are frequently accompanied by side effects. A newer class of therapy, which is sometimes used in combination with chemotherapy and steroids, is biologic response modifiers. These are antibodies or other proteins that reduce the inflammation produced by the hyperactive immune cells. These biologics don’t work for everyone, though, and can be associated with side effects including the risk of infection.

Perlman said the next step is to develop nanotechnology for a more precise method of delivering the drug. His research was supported by the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

- MFP Wire Services
- 01-30-2010

PERTH, WA, AUSTRALIA – Adults aged over 70 years who are classified as overweight are less likely to die over a ten year period than adults who are in the ‘normal’ weight range, according to a new study published in a recent Journal of The American Geriatrics Society.

Researchers looked at data taken over a decade among more than 9,200 Australian men and women aged between 70 and 75 at the beginning of the study, who were assessed for their health and lifestyle as part of a study into healthy aging. The paper sheds light on the situation in Australia, which is ranked the third most obese country, behind the United States and the United Kingdom.

Obesity and overweight are most commonly defined according to body mass index, which is calculated by dividing body weight (in kg) by the square of height (in metres). The World Health Organization defines four principal categories: underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. The thresholds for these categories were primarily based on evidence from studies of morbidity and mortality risk in younger and middle-aged adults, but it remains unclear whether the overweight and obese cut-points are overly restrictive measures for predicting mortality in older people.

The study began in 1996 and recruited 4,677 men and 4,563 women. The participants were followed for ten years or until their death, whichever was sooner, and factors such as lifestyle, demographics, and health were measured. The research uncovered that mortality risk was lowest for participants with a body mass index classified as overweight, with the risk of death reduced by 13% compared with normal weight participants. The benefits were only seen in the overweight category not in those people who are obese.

“Concerns have been raised about encouraging apparently overweight older people to lose weight and as such the objective of our study was to examine the major unresolved question of, ‘what level of body mass index is associated with the lowest mortality risk in older people?’” said lead researcher Prof. Leon Flicker, of the University of Western Australia. “These results add evidence to the claims that the World Health Organization body mass index thresholds for overweight and obese are overly restrictive for older people. It may be timely to review the body mass index classification for older adults.”

In those participants who died before the conclusion of the study, the researchers concluded that the type of disease which caused their death, for example heart disease or cancer, did not affect the level of protection being overweight had. To remove any risk of bias in participants with illnesses which caused them to lose weight, and also increased their risk of dying, the researchers contrasted subjects who were relatively healthy compared with those who had major chronic diseases or smoked and found no apparent differences in the body mass index: mortality relationship.

While the same benefit in being overweight was true for men and women, being sedentary doubled the risk of death for women, whereas it only increased the risk by a quarter in men.

“Our study suggests that those people who survive to age 70 in reasonable health have a different set of risks and benefits associated with the amount of body fat to younger people, and these should be reflected in body mass index guidelines,” concluded Flicker.

- MFP Wire Services
- 01-30-2010

By: Edward Susman

ORLANDO, FL – Treating neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas with sunitinib more than doubles progression-free survival compared with placebo according to a phase 3 study.

“We found a significant improvement in progression-free survival — 11.4 months with sunitinib versus 5.5 months with placebo [P < .0001],” said Eric Raymond, MD, Medical Oncology Department, Hôpital Beaujon, Clichy, France, during a poster presentation at the 2010 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.

Eric Raymond, MD

“We also observed a significant survival benefit, with about a 60% reduction in the risk of death [P = .0204] if a person was taking sunitinib for these cancers.”

While the percentage of patients who achieved an objective response was just 9.3%, it was still significant compared with placebo patients, none of whom achieved a partial response to therapy.

“What we also observed is that even though these neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas are considered slow-growing cancers, we saw that if you don’t treat these tumors, they are no longer indolent,” said Dr. Raymond.

Dr. Raymond presented final results from a randomized, international, double-blind trial in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumors that was halted almost a year ago with only about half of the planned patients (340) enrolled at the recommendation of the Independent Safety Data Monitoring Committee due to differences in efficacy.

In the trial, 86 patients with progressive, well-differentiated, malignant pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors were randomly assigned to receive sunitinib 37.5 mg/day plus best supportive care while another 85 patients were assigned to receive placebo plus best supportive care.

“The magnitude of sunitinib’s benefit in the pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor patient population was an encouraging finding,” said Dr. Raymond. “These findings offer hope to a patient population for whom there are limited treatment options.”

Adverse events were similar to those observed in other sunitinib studies. The most commonly reported grade 3/4 adverse events in the sunitinib arm were neutropenia (12%), hypertension (9.6%), hand-foot syndrome (6%), and leucopenia (6%).

Funding for this study was provided by Pfizer.

The 2010 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium was sponsored by the American Gastroenterological Association Institute, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Therapeutic Radiation Oncology, and the Society of Surgical Oncology.

- MFP Wire Services
- 01-29-2010