Some of the world's top minds in cancer research will gather this weekend to ponder new ways of ensuring that people won't ever need to seek cancer treatment.

The Tenth Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research theme is Advancing Cancer Prevention Through Technology.

"Cancer treatment has been transformed by technology to facilitate personalized cancer therapy. We chose this theme to promote the same transformation to a personalized approach for cancer prevention," says Powel Brown, M.D., Ph.D., chair of MD Anderson's Department of Clinical Cancer Prevention and scientific program chairman for the meeting. He will open the meeting's first session Saturday night.

Personalized medicine
High-tech discovery, analysis and application of genetic variation, gene expression and protein activity are allowing oncologists to more precisely match a course of treatment to a patient's specific tumor. 

A pair of proteins found to be overexpressed in a variety of cancers actually link to each other in glioblastoma multiforme. In the process, they support the survival and function of tumor-initiating cells in the most common and lethal form of brain tumor.

MD Anderson researchers report the connection between FoxM1 and beta-catenin in this week's edition of the journal Cancer Cell.

Their findings are the first to put FoxM1 in the Wnt signaling pathway, which normally regulates neural stem cells, says senior author Suyun Huang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in MD Anderson's Department of Neurosurgery.

"When FoxM1 binds to beta-catenin, we found that it also supports the self-renewal and differentiation of glioma-initiating cells, the cancer stem cells thought to drive glioblastoma multiforme," Huang says. Glioma-initiating cells are prime suspects in the disease's resistance to treatment and ability to reoccur."

By Katrina Burton

New data released from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) shows men who took daily doses of vitamin E had significantly more prostate cancers compared to men who took a placebo.

SELECT, a cancer prevention trial funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), closed in September 2008, with initial findings indicating no reduction in the risk of prostate cancer for participants using selenium or vitamin E supplements. Early results also suggested that there was a possible relationship between vitamin E and prostate cancer that might have been due to chance.

Recent findings published in the Oct. 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association paint a different picture.

No benefits
Almost three years after the trial recommended that participants stop using the supplements for lack of evidence of benefit, further analysis revealed a 17 percent increase in prostate cancers among men who took vitamin E supplement compared to participants receiving a placebo.

"The findings are important because we now know for sure that there is no benefit for men who take vitamin E supplements," said Elise Cook, M.D, associate professor of Clinical Cancer Prevention and co-investigator on the study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "Vitamin E does not prevent prostate cancer, and appears to not only increase the risk of prostate cancer, but in some cases it increases the risk of heart failure and mortality in patients with coronary artery disease."

Mutations of a tumor-suppressing gene that raise a woman's risk of developing ovarian cancer actually increase her chances of surviving the disease when they are present in her tumor.

This seemingly contradictory finding by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center about the BRCA2 gene is reported in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

They found that women with BRCA2 mutations in their tumors live longer and respond better to platinum-based drugs than those who have mutations in BRCA1, a sister tumor-suppressing gene, or regular versions of BRCA2 in their cancer.

Wei Zhang, Ph.D., professor in MD Anderson's Department of Pathology, and colleagues studied 316 cases of high-grade serous ovarian cancer - the most common form, which occurs on the surface of the ovaries.  All patients had been treated with surgery followed by platinum-based chemotherapy. 

Every patient with BRCA2 mutations in her tumor responded to platinum chemotherapy, compared to 80% with BRCA1 mutations and 82% with the normal BRCA2.  Of those with BRCA2 mutations, 44% had progression-free survival at three years, compared with 16% of those with normal BRCA2 and 22% with BRCA1 mutations.

People across the world are mourning the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who passed away Wednesday, Oct 5, following a battle with pancreatic cancer. Jobs' death has turned attention to rare form of cancer, for which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this May approved a new drug - the first new option in nearly 30 years. Learn more about the drug, everolimus, and how it's helping patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors,  

By Lori Baker, MD Anderson Staff Writer

Not many emails make you cry. But tears of joy rolled down Carmen Jacobs' face when she read that the drug everolimus had been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (pNET).

She considers this treatment one of her biggest efforts as a research nurse, and this news meant it had just been delivered to patients everywhere. It's a much-anticipated arrival, since this is the first new treatment option for these patients in nearly 30 years.

"I was there when Dr.Yao treated the first patient in the very first clinical trial about six years ago," says Jacobs, research nurse supervisor, Gastrointestinal (GI) Medical Oncology, who also worked on each subsequent trial. "I was so happy when I got his message saying it was approved. Now all of these patients have access to a new treatment that provides more hope for a longer and better life."