The Endeavour

CaringBridge offers “free, personalized websites that support and connect loved ones during critical illness, treatment and recovery.” The site is sponsored by donors, not advertising.

When he was diagnosed with cancer four years ago, a friend of mine set up a password-protected web page to let us know the latest updates on his treatment and diagnosis. I appreciated his doing this. He could easily set up his own site, but not everyone knows how to do that. CaringBridge lets people who are not as technically inclined set up their own site. Patients can upload photos, exchange messages with friends, etc. About 100,000 families have set up web sites through CaringBridge so far.

Chemotherapy harms cancer cells as well as normal cells. Chemotherapy is designed to be more harmful to cancer cells than to normal cells, but the damage to normal cells can be brutal.

New studies suggest that fasting prior to receiving chemotherapy may reduce the number of normal cells harmed by the treatment. Fasting may put normal cells in a defensive mode that increases their resistance to chemical attack.

A gene therapy developed at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center for head and neck cancer is the first such treatment to succeed in a phase III trial. See the press release for more details.

(Phase III studies are large, multi-institutional studies required for regulatory approval of new drugs.)

Imagine this conversation with your doctor:

Your poor tumor. It has a chaotic blood supply. Parts of it get too much blood, other parts too little. We’re going to give you a drug to improve your tumor’s blood supply, making it healthier.

Before you run screaming from your doctor’s office, see if there’s a copy of the January 2008 issue of Scientific American in the waiting room. If there is, read the article Taming Vessels to Treat Cancer by Rakesh Jain.

Just as the cells in a tumor are abnormal and growing out of control, so are the blood vessels that feed the tumor. This lack of proper infrastructure inhibits the tumor’s growth, but it also makes it difficult to deliver chemotherapy to the tumor. This lead to the radical idea to make the tumors healthier in preparation for killing them.

So how would you go about improving a tumor’s circulatory system? By administering a drug that was designed to attack tumor vessels!

A new class of cancer drugs, antiangiogenic agents, has been designed to attack tumors by cutting off their blood supply. These agents haven’t been a complete success. Experience with one such agent, Avastin, shows that while it shuts down some of the blood vessels in tumors, it may make the remaining tumor vessels healthier. That’s bad news if you’re treating patients with Avastin alone. But when used in combination with chemotherapy, it’s just what people like Dr. Jain were looking for: a way to normalize the blood flow in a tumor in order to make it more vulnerable to chemotherapy.

More information, including videos, is available at the web site of Dr. Jain’s lab.