A new FOE, I like it......

The writing lesson, by Albert Anker, 1865. 

Hello All!! 


Today is the day we have been waiting for!  Carolyn's treatment will begin in Boston today, she will be closely monitored throughout the day.  We are all praying that her body takes treatment well and begins to shirk those tumors.  


Here is a great article we found, Keith Flaherty is Carolyn's Doctor.


A new Foe for Advanced Melanoma: drug offers hope to half of patients with deadly skin cancer.



A new drug may change the landscape of melanoma treatment, offering patients a treatment option beyond anything now in use against the skin cancer. Tests in people whose melanoma had spread showed the drug was able to shrink tumors in most patients and, in a few cases, even wipe the growths out, scientists report in the Aug. 26 New England Journal of Medicine. The compound targets the protein encoded by a mutated version of the BRAF gene that underlies melanoma in roughly half of all patients.
"This is clearly a turning point" in melanoma treatment, says study coauthor Paul Chapman of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. "It's the first time we're actually treating the genetics of the tumor."
Most early-stage melanomas can be surgically removed and stopped. But patients' prospects take a deadly turn if the cancer spreads beyond an initial skin lesion. Chemotherapy drugs benefit fewer than 20 percent of such patients.
In the new study, Chapman, Keith Flaherty of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues treated 48 patients who had BRAF-related metastatic melanoma with PLX4032, a drug devised to stop the mutant BRAF protein from triggering cell growth.
Of the 48 patients, 37 experienced tumor shrinkage of at least 30 percent. In three, the tumors resolved completely. This tumor suppression lasted from three months to about two years. Some patients still take the drug. On average, the patients on the drug relapsed after nearly eight months, Flaherty says. That's because the tumors develop ways to subvert the effects of PLX4032.
The results add to other recent good news. In the Aug. 19 NEJM, scientists reported that an experimental drug, ipilimumab, seems to extend survival in metastatic melanoma patients. And a 2008 study found that melanomas linked to the less common c-kit mutation were susceptible to the leukemia drug Gleevec.

COPYRIGHT 2010 Science Service, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning.