It’s news we all hope to avoid: You or a loved one has cancer. 

Now brace yourself for another blow: Getting the right treatment at an affordable price can be next to impossible. It’s a problem that’s become commonplace nationwide and happens all too often in Pennsylvania. On Jan. 26, 2007, I was working in my office at St. Patrick School in Carlisle when I received the call from my doctor: chronic myelogenous leukemia.

 My entire body went numb when I heard the word leukemia. Ten years ago, the only hope for survival would have been a complete bone marrow transplant, which would have included months in the hospital and a 60 percent chance of survival.

Today, thanks to research, we are fortunate enough to have access to oral chemotherapies. I began taking a pill called Gleevec. When I went to the pharmacy to have my prescription filled, the pharmacist informed me that it was expensive. It’s OK, I thought, I have prescription coverage that covers 80 percent of the costs of my medicine. I picked up the pills and was charged $1,100.

Read more about oral chemotherapy from the Patriot News

On the cost of providing cancer care becoming unsustainable, even in rich nations:

An explosion of new technologies and treatments for cancer coupled with a rapid rise in cases of the disease worldwide mean cancer care is rapidly becoming unaffordable in many developed countries, oncology experts said on Monday.

With costs ballooning, a radical shift in thinking is needed to ensure fairer access to medicines and address tricky questions like balancing extra months of life for patients against costs of a new drug, technology or care plan, they said.

…

Some 12 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer each year and that number is expected to rise to 27 million by 2030.

On an osteoporosis drug that may be able to double as a pain reliever for prostate cancer patients:

Roche’s bone strengthening drug Boniva is as good for pain relief as single dose radiotherapy in patients whose prostate cancer has spread to their bones, according to data from a late-stage trial released on Sunday.

Trial investigators said the level side effects of Boniva — known generically as ibandronate (IB) — were also comparable with radiotherapy, suggesting it could offer an alternative option for advanced cancer patients suffering pain.

Bone metastases, or secondary tumors in the bone, are common in many advanced cancers and “are a serious problem for men with prostate cancer,” said Peter Hoskin a professor clinical oncology at University College, London, who presented the data at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress (EMCC) in Stockholm on Sunday.

On drugs from two different pharma companies being combined to create a new breast cancer treatment:

C ombining two drugs from Novartis and Pfizer to treat post-menopausal women with a certain type of advanced breast cancer more than doubled the time they lived without their disease getting worse, study data showed on Monday.

Investigators conducting a clinical trial found that women treated with a combination of Novartis’ Afinitor or everolimus, and Pfizer’s oestrogen-blocker Aromasin, known generically as xemestane, had progression-free survival (PFS) of as much as seven months more than women treated with the Pfizer drug alone.

“This is a highly significant improvement in the time to disease progression. It’s quite remarkable,” said Jose Baselga of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who led the trial and presented the data at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress (EMCC) in Stockholm.

On a drug that may be able to help women with terminal breast cancer live longer:

Women with an aggressive type of advanced breast cancer can live significantly longer without their disease getting worse if they are treated with an experimental “armed antibody” drug from Roche, researchers said on Sunday.

Data from a mid-stage clinical trial of the new combination drug, trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1), in HER2-positive breast cancer found patients given T-DM1 had a 41 percent improvement in the time without their breast cancer worsening compared with those given trastuzumab, or Herceptin, plus chemotherapy.

St. Luke’s is not closing its established facilities, but is hoping that by locating the campus easily reached from the north on Route 33 and via nearby Interstate 78, more people will choose it for their cancer care.

Reports the Morning Call:

“Pennsylvania has a slowly growing market of cancer patients. According to the most recent state Department of Health report, cancer cases statewide grew from about 69,000 in 1999 to more than 75,000 in 2008. With more people living longer, and cancer care getting better, it’s likely that demand for cancer services will remain, said Dr. Nimisha Deb, chief of Radiation Oncology at the center.”

…

“Chemotherapy patients such as Gage Kiriposki of Coopersburg, who also was at the center Monday, will be soon be able to relax during their infusion therapy while gazing to the south at a pond St. Luke’s is building or at the fields stretching east, where St. Luke’s has its eyes — someday, but not soon — on developing more facilities.

About 1,000 parking spaces will be available on the campus, alleviating a routine complaint about St. Luke’s Hospital’s Fountain Hill site.

The center on the inside is done in neutral colors and adorned with artwork depicting nature, which Pinto said is designed to provide a calming touch.

Go deeper inside the building, however, and it’s all business. The center has a state-of-the-art stereotactic linear accelerator used to provide radiation treatments in delicate places such as the brain and spine. Because the technology is so advanced, patients can receive higher doses directed at the exact site of the tumor and not at surrounding health tissue, Deb said.

When the hospital opens, around 400 people will be working on the campus, with about 25-30 employees at the cancer center.”

Lancaster General Health will break ground for a $44 million cancer center next week at the Suburban Outpatient Pavilion on Harrisburg Pike in East Hempfield Township.

The 70,000-square-foot building will bring medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, surgeons and other cancer specialists together in one location, according to a news release. The Suzanne H. Arnold Center for Breast Health will be integrated into the two-story cancer center.

The latest diagnostic and treatment technologies will be installed in the Ann B. Barshinger Cancer Center, including a gamma knife for noninvasive treatment of tumors, and TomoTherapy with 3-D imaging and targeted radiation beams, the organization said.

The building also will include infusion and chemotherapy suites for patient comfort, a healing garden and an education center, according to the release.

Read more from Central Penn Business Journal

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a first-of-its kind drug for the treatment of certain types of melanoma.

The Moffitt Cancer Center was the only institution in Florida that conducted a trial for the drug, vemurafenib, a company statement said.

The drug, which has the brand name Zelboraf, was approved for treating metastic melanoma patients who test positive for a gene mutation called BRAFV600E. The mutant BRAF protein is found in about half of all cases of melanoma, the most lethal form of skin cancer, the statement said.

Read more from the Tampa Bay Business Journal

With his blood cancer progressing and standard chemotherapies no longer working, the patient decided to try an experimental gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Twenty-two days after getting a very low dose, he had to be hospitalized because of toxic effects on his kidneys and liver – a problem the researchers had anticipated but considered unlikely.

And then, the very next day, something happened that the researchers had not anticipated, despite 20 years of refining the treatment.

Tests showed the 64-year-old patient’s chronic lymphocytic leukemia was gone. Eradicated.

The deadly disease also disappeared in another advanced-stage patient, and dramatically regressed in a third. All three remain in remission, the longest lasting almost a year.

“It exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Carl June, a gene therapy pioneer at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center who led the work.

On Wednesday, two prestigious journals – New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine – simultaneously published the Penn breakthrough. June’s team genetically engineered each patient’s T cells – the big guns of the immune system – to recognize and attack the malignant cells, then stand guard against the disease.

Although chronic lymphocytic leukemia is rare and slow-growing, the study has implications for a large group of blood cancers, including many lymphomas, that are diagnosed in 87,000 Americans a year. In these cancers, malignancy arises in B cells, which are the target of the Penn gene therapy.

In an editorial in the New England Journal, two oncologists called the results of the new study impressive. But they warned that toxic effects, known and unknown, “could pose substantial problems.”

Only wider testing will show if the breakthrough is “an authentic advance” toward a novel medicine for B-cell malignancies, or yet another “lead that runs into a barrier,” wrote lead editorialist Walter Urba of the Chiles Research Institute in Oregon.

Read more here.

Dr. Randy Oyer was at the airport about six weeks ago when his cellphone rang.

It was a York County man who had tracked down the director of Lancaster General Hospital’s cancer treatment program in the hopes that he could bring his wife to LGH because she could not get the cancer drugs she needed in their community.

Oyer did not have good news for the man.

“I said, even if we have a supply this week, we would not be able to determine if we would have the drug long-term,” he said. “We all face this problem every week.”

For about the past year, local cancer doctors and hospital pharmacies have been struggling with a shortage of cancer drugs that is affecting the entire nation.

“This year, I have really noticed it,” said Dr. Brian Calabrese, medical oncologist with Lancaster Hematology Oncology Care, which practices at Lancaster Regional Medical Center. “The shortages wax and wane, but from the looks of it, it’s a problem that won’t go away and potentially could worsen in the future.”

The shortages are changing the way cancer patients are treated here and elsewhere.

For the rest of the story, read the Lancaster Intelligencer

Certain environmental exposures are known to increase your risk of cancer: tobacco smoke, UV radiation and even pollution. But what about some common metals and chemicals that cause contact allergies?

Curiously, according to the latest research from scientists in Denmark, these environmental allergens may actually help protect some people from developing cancer. After studying more than 17,000 adults who were tested for common contact allergies — for instance, to nickel and other chemicals — lead author Kaare Engkilde of the National Allergy Research Center at Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte concluded that those who tested positive for such allergies were less likely to develop cancer years later than those who did not have contact allergies.

Engkilde’s team matched up the allergy test results, which were collected in a database from 1984 to 2008, with Denmark’s national cancer registry, which has recorded all cases of diagnosed cancer among citizens since 1943. For some of the participants, therefore, the study follow-up stretched to nearly three decades.

About a third of people tested positive for contact allergies, which means they developed a rash or swelling when researchers exposed a patch of their skin to an allergen. A smaller proportion, nearly 20% of all of the people tested, went on to develop some type of growth, either malignant or benign; of these, about 38% had tested positive for allergy.

The researchers found that having a contact allergy was associated with a strong protective effect against cancer: those who tested positive for allergies were less likely to develop cancer in later years than those who didn’t have allergies. The relationship was strongest for breast and skin cancers that weren’t due to melanoma.

For the rest of the story, go to Time Healthland

Many patients with advanced cancer must feel great relief after last week’s decisions by Medicare to pay for two drugs that provide limited medical benefits. For these patients, even a few more months of life is beyond price.

The unaddressed issue, however, is whether public and private insurance should continue to pay the staggeringly high cost — reaching $88,000 and $93,000 in some cases — for drugs that offer modest help to the typical patient. A prime driver of our escalating health care costs is the advance of medical technology and the understandable desire of patients and doctors to adopt the latest treatment. Sooner or later, as the nation struggles to contain health care spending, we may need to devise measures to determine whether very high-priced drugs provide enough medical benefit to warrant paying the bill.

Neither the Food and Drug Administration, which decides which drugs can be marketed, nor Medicare, which decides which treatments to cover, considers costs.

For the rest of the story, read The New York Times

Increased screening during the last decade for colorectal cancer, the nation’s second-leading cause of cancer deaths, has put a sharp dent in the prevalence of the disease and in the number of deaths resulting from it, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

As screening for the disease among those ages 50 to 75 increased from half to two-thirds of that population, the prevalence rate fell from 52.3 cases per 100,000 in 2003 to 45.4 per 100,000 in 2007. The death rate fell from 19 per 100,000 to 16.7 per 100,000 during the same period, the agency reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Those declines represent 66,000 fewer cancers during the period and 32,000 fewer deaths, the agency found. But there are still 22 million Americans in that age group who are not being screened, the report says.

“That’s a remarkable increase in screening … but we are concerned that it is beginning to level off,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the CDC director.

For more on the story, read the Los Angeles Times