June presented good news
June gets insanely hectic between Relay for Life and ongoing preparations for the Marathon Walk. July, as a result, starts slowly for me as I try to recover from long days and sometimes longer nights. That doesn’t mean there isn’t news to report–it just means I’m too tired to make much effort to get it out there.
This is the first effort to combine the two.
This June brought several pieces of carcinoid/NETs good news with it. And our Relay performance was not too shabby either, as our Walking with Jane team was successful in keeping someone on the track for virtually the entire time, while raising over $9,000 for the American Cancer Society.
Video features latest on pancreatic NETS
But the good carcinoid/NETs news came in the form of two papers and a video. The video is a panel discussion led by Dana-Farber’s Matthew Kulke on the latest thoughts on pancreatic NETs, including diagnostics, treatment studies, and what those things may mean for patients with that form of the disease and their doctors.
…the symptoms can be so similar.
The total running time of the video is about an hour, but ONCOlive, which did the video, has broken it up into smaller pieces that focus on different aspects of the disease. The other news is it appears they plan to make these on a regular basis for several different forms of cancer. The idea is similar to one I’ve been working to make reality for several months.
News on finding primary tumors
One of the trickier problems in treatment of any form of NET cancer is figuring out where the primary tumor is. If the tumor originates in the pancreas, for example, its treatment is much different than if the primary is located in the small intestine. The difference between those two forms of the disease is especially tricky because the symptoms can be so similar.
Now, a genetic profiling test developed in Boston can tell doctors with great accuracy whether the primary tumor is pancreatic or small intestine based. The test went 10 for 10 in identifying the location of pancreatic primaries–and was correct over 96 percent of the time in categorizing small intestine NETs.
New treatment regimen studied
Finally, there is news of a new treatment regimen that combines chemo and radiation therapies for carcinoid/NETs patients who have high levels of somastatin receptors that shows great promise. Peptide receptor chemoradionuclide therapy (PRCRT) was used on 68 patients in Australia with significant results that included both symptom reduction and slower disease progression.
June gets insanely hectic…
The therapy combines 177Lu-DOTA-octreotate chemoradionuclide therapy with fluorouracil (5-FU) chemotherapy. Both have been used separately with good effect. This is the first effort to combine the two. The results are preliminary as the data has not fully matured yet and the sample size is quite small.
