FDA approves first use of novel immune system drug for cancer

Do not fear Chemotherapy ! Understand Chemotherapy and how to deal with it. A great video in Hindi by SanjeevaniLifeBeyondCancer  

Women with breast cancer tumors that overexpress human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) may benefit from a novel vaccine to prevent recurrence A new breast cancer vaccine candidate, (GP2), provides further evidence of the potential of immunotherapy in preventing disease recurrence. One of only a few vaccines of its kind in development, GP2 has been shown to be safe and effective for breast cancer patients, reducing recurrence rates by 57%. Further, women with the highest overexpression…

"I was originally diagnosed with locally advanced cancer, so that means it's advanced within in the chest. Mine was triple negative. It's the most aggressive form of cancer," she said. Her breast cancer diagnosis came in 2008. She found out about her metastatic breast cancer in January 2011, at 33 years old. "Two and half years after my original diagnosis, I found another lump," she said as she held back tears. "It varies from person to person. But my experience has been a bit of a roller…

How she shared the information with her kids and why - http://www.today.com/health/joan-lunden-how-i-told-my-kids-i-have-cancer-2D80186889 The choices she made in terms of treatment - http://www.people.com/article/joan-lunden-chemotherapy-cancer

Don’t fight cancer, heal it by attending to body, mind and spirit, says surgical oncologist Dr Vishal Rao. A child developing from an embryo in a mother’s womb is, in reality, a set of rapidly multiplying cells. But they are controlled and regulated. So, we choose to ‘love’ those cells. But when another set of cells multiply rapidly within our body, albeit haphazardly, we call it ‘Cancerous’! These cells are not foreign cells that have made an appearance from outside,…

Geoffrey Boycott describes how counting off his radiotherapy sessions like runs in cricket and Feng Shui helped him survive cancer http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/11080199/Geoffrey-Boycott-reve…

Mayo Clinic unveiled today a partnership with IBM to harness the power of its Watson supercomputer to match patients with the right clinical trials. Starting early next year, Watson will initially enroll patients with breast, colorectal and lung cancers based on eligibility. There are 170,000 ongoing clinical trials around the world, however, according to the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation, only 6% are completed on time. Enrolling patients in the…

This new class of drugs unleashes the body's immune system to fight tumors. This seems to solve a century-old mystery of how cancerous cells manage to evade the body's immune system. The drug which Merck will sell under the name of Keytruda was approved by patients with advanced melanoma who have exhausted other therapies.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/05/business/merck-wins-approval-of-novel-immune-system-drug-for-cancer.html?emc=eta1

Clinical depression was much more prevalent among cancer patients than in the general population, where around 2% of people suffer from the mental illness at any point in time. Among cancer patients, clinical depression ranged from 13% in people with lung cancer to 6% in people with genitourinary cancer. The study's lead author Michael Sharpe, from Oxford University, said: "Major depression is really quite common in people with cancer and the perhaps surprising finding is that most of it goes…

 Excess weight linked to 10 different cancers Cancers have many causes – some of them genetic and some environmental. But the researchers, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Farr Institute of Health Informatics, have taken account of all the other factors involved in order to come up with a good estimate of the actual number of cancers that could be prevented if people kept to a normal weight. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/14/excess-weight…