University of Pennsylvania"s Mesothelioma Program Receives $8 Million Grant from NCI

The National Cancer Institute awarded an $8 million grant to the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine to study the effects of photodynamic light therapy (PDT) in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma. The grant will fund a clinical trial and additional studies looking at the effects of PDT on the patient’s immune response, the mesothelioma tumor cell , and the blood vessels surrounding the tumor.Dr. Eli Glatstein is the principal investigator of the program. He is also the professor and vice chair of Radiation Oncology, and member of Penn’s Mesothelioma and Pleural Program. According to Dr. Glatstein, “This trial represents a major step in understanding the combination of treatment modalities that will offer patients the best hope for survival and extended remission.”The study expects to …


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The parasite that escaped out of Africa: Tracing origins of malaria parasite

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An international team of scientists has traced the origin of Plasmodium vivax, the second-worst malaria parasite of humans, to Africa, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications. Until recently, the closest genetic relatives of human P. vivax were found only in Asian macaques, leading researchers to believe that P. vivax originated in Asia.The study, led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, found that wild-living apes in central Africa are widely infected with parasites that, genetically, are nearly identical to human P. vivax.This finding overturns the dogma that P. vivax originated in Asia, despite being most prevalent in humans there now, and also solves other vexing questions about P. vivax infection: how a mutation conferring resistance to P. vivax occurs at high frequency in the very region where this parasite seems absent and how travelers returning from regions where almost all humans lack the receptor for P. vivax can be infected with this parasite.Of Ape and Human ParasitesMembers of the labs of Beatrice Hahn, MD, and George Shaw, MD, PhD, both professors of Medicine and Microbiology at Penn, in collaboration with Paul Sharp, PhD, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Edinburgh, and Martine Peeters, PhD, a microbiologist from the Institut de Recherche pour le Dveloppement and the University of Montpellier, tested over 5,000 ape fecal samples from dozens of field stations and sanctuaries in Africa for P. vivax DNA. …


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Cell therapy shows remarkable ability to eradicate cancer in clinical study

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Investigators from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have reported more encouraging news about one of the most exciting methods of cancer treatment today. The largest clinical study ever conducted to date of patients with advanced leukemia found that 88 percent achieved complete remissions after being treated with genetically modified versions of their own immune cells. The results were published today in Science Translational Medicine.”These extraordinary results demonstrate that cell therapy is a powerful treatment for patients who have exhausted all conventional therapies,” said Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering and one of the study’s senior authors. “Our initial findings have held up in a larger cohort of patients, and we are already looking at new clinical studies to advance this novel therapeutic approach in fighting cancer.”Adult B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), a type of blood cancer that develops in B cells, is difficult to treat because the majority of patients relapse. Patients with relapsed B-ALL have few treatment options; only 30 percent respond to salvage chemotherapy. Without a successful bone marrow transplant, few have any hope of long-term survival.In the current study, 16 patients with relapsed B-ALL were given an infusion of their own genetically modified immune cells, called T cells. The cells were “reeducated” to recognize and destroy cancer cells that contain the protein CD19. While the overall complete response rate for all patients was 88 percent, even those with detectable disease prior to treatment had a complete response rate of 78 percent, far exceeding the complete response rate of salvage chemotherapy alone.Dennis J. Billy, C.Ss.R, of Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, was one of the first patients to receive this treatment more than two years ago. He was able to successfully undergo a bone marrow transplant and has been cancer-free and back at work teaching theology since 2011. …


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Physician urges greater recognition of how "misfearing" influences women"s perceptions of heart health risks

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While more women die from heart disease each year than all forms of cancer combined, many are more fearful of other diseases, particularly breast cancer. This phenomenon, referred to as “misfearing,” describes the human tendency to fear instinctively and according to societal influences rather than based on facts. This trend may be a contributor to the reasons why many women fail to take enough steps — such as changing diet and fitness habits or risk-taking behaviors — to guard against heart disease.In a Perspective column today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Penn Medicine cardiologist and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, notes that although the first decade of educational campaigns to inform women about heart disease “led to a near doubling of women’s knowledge about heart disease, in the past few years, such efforts have failed to reap further gains.” Moreover, “persistent gaps in perceptions remain among minority women, who are often at greatest risk.”Simply reinforcing the facts about the prevalence and potential prevention of heart disease among women is likely not enough to improve on these results, says Rosenbaum. Instead, physicians and others in health care need to develop an understanding of the misfearing paradigm and how “social values” and “group identities” affect patients’ perceptions of disease.”The big, the dramatic, and the memorable occupy far more of our worry budget than the things that kill with far greater frequency: strokes, diabetes, heart disease,” she writes. “But interacting with many of these fear factors is another force we rarely associate with our individual health perceptions: our commitment to our cultural groups.”Women’s focus on breast cancer may be tied, according to Rosenbaum, to “intuitions about female identity” that shape their interpretation of health-related information and relevant behavior. Because breast cancer “attacks a body part that is so fundamental to female identity,” she asks if “to be a woman, one must join the war on this disease,” and consequently focus less on heart disease (which is often linked to such perceived anti-feminine contributing factors as cigarettes and obesity). Additionally, Rosenbaum asks, “Are we held up by our ideal of beauty? We can each summon the images of beautiful young women with breast cancer. Where are all the beautiful women with heart disease?”While acknowledging the very real threat of women’s cancers, Dr. Rosenbaum advocates physicians taking a different approach to conversations with female patients about cardiovascular health. …


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