Posted on 06/20/2009 3:02:18 PM PDT by neverdem
Learning you have prostate cancer is bad enough, but then to be told that your condition is inoperable can be devastating. That’s where Rodger Nelson found himself. He and his wife Carol were wintering in California. Doctors there made the diagnosis, but it wasn’t until he decided to return home to Minnesota for treatment that he was told an experimental therapy was his best option.
“I arrived Tuesday and was told my surgery was scheduled for Friday,” says Nelson. “But when the final test came back late on Thursday, I was told the surgery was cancelled.” MRIs had shown the tumor had grown beyond the prostate and was encroaching on the stomach. That’s when urologist and surgeon Michael Blute, M.D., referred his patient to urologist and immunologist Eugene Kwon, M.D., who was conducting a clinical trial on prostate cancer.
Dr. Kwon had been working on the foundations of this study for over ten years, when he did the initial laboratory and modeling studies when he was on staff at the National Institutes of Health. He was a practicing surgeon at Loyola Medical Center recruited to Mayo Clinic by Dr. Blute and then developed collaborations with him and others.
“The goal of the study was to see if we could modestly improve upon current treatments for advanced prostate cancer,” Dr. Kwon explains. “The candidates for this study were people who didn’t have a lot of other options. However we were startled to see responses that far exceeded any of our expectations.”
Though many men experience prostate cancer when older, the cancer usually doesn’t progress quickly enough to be life threatening. However, a significant subset are aggressive forms of prostate cancer. These are aggressive, virulent and deadly, advancing so quickly, that diagnosis often comes too late for any effective therapy...
(Excerpt) Read more at discoverysedge.mayo.edu ...
Lorianne, with verboten sources like the UK’s Independent, all you can do is link the title, no text, IIRC.
admin moderator, any corrections are always appreciated.
very interesting......
bttt
Further studies? Yes. But there were 108 in this study, half randomized to the treatment group and half to the control group. So two of the 54 in the treatment group had this amazing response. But 52 didn't.
Same old, same old as every clinical trial I've ever worked in or heard about... It should always make us suspicious when a couple of overenthusiastic researchers start counting their Nobel Prizes before they hatch.
What is the chance of anything like this happening under “Obambi” care?
Depends on whether Obambi gets prostate cancer.
Is there data on the other 52? I didn’t notice it in the article. These two patients certainly had a dramatic response. I suppose it’s possible they had an unsually good response to the hormone treatment. But the article indicates they were not expected to live long without the study treatment.
The investigators have the data and aren’t saying much about it, which makes me even more leery of their claims. Although I did read one article about it that said all the results aren’t in yet. If that’s true, what these two fellows are doing is picking and choosing which patients they want to talk about publicly while ignoring everyone else in the study. It’s just not how you do a study... I mean, why bother?
Michelle sports the prostate in that particular family....
With the Indenpendent, Huffington Post and other restricted sources, that's all you can do. So I link them on other threads like this or an unrelated health or science thread of mine. Open it in a new window, and no one can say you're hijacking your own thread.
Same old, same old as every clinical trial I've ever worked in or heard about... It should always make us suspicious when a couple of overenthusiastic researchers start counting their Nobel Prizes before they hatch.
Do an author search of Blute m, kwon e at PubMed.
They have 36 other citations. These are two good case reports, and good PR for Mayo.
They have found a great deal of genetic variation within just particular types of cancer such as prostate. This monoclonal antibody might be good for only one subtype. Who knows? But I'll bet money that they write it up. It depends on the protocols they agreed to follow when they started the study, e.g. how long to follow the patients, what they would agree as endpoints, etc. Then they have to find a journal that wants to print it.
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