WEDNESDAY, March 3 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists are making headway in finding ways to treat and detect stubborn forms of prostate cancer.

The new hope comes from three studies being presented this week at the annual Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco.

"Genitourinary cancers include cancers of the prostate, kidney, bladder and testicles," Dr. Nicholas J. Vogelzang, chairman and medical director of the developmental therapeutics committee at U.S. Oncology, explained at a Wednesday teleconference announcing the various findings. "The most common of these is prostate cancer, which is diagnosed in 192,000 men and claims 27,000 lives each year."

The first study, led by Dr. Oliver Sartor of Tulane Cancer Center, New Orleans, found that a new investigational drug called cabazitaxel improved overall survival in men whose prostate cancer had progressed despite being treated with hormone therapy and docetaxel-containing chemotherapy.

Men receiving cabazitaxel plus mitoxantrone (a chemotherapy drug) lived 15.1 months compared to 12.7 months for patients who received mitoxantrone plus prednisone. This represents a 30 percent increase in survival, which may not seem long but is seen as significant for men with a poor prognosis.

"Advances in cancer therapy have always been incremental. We have only a few examples of massive improvements with one drug," Vogelzang noted. "Three months is a major clinical advance."

Other studies are looking at whether giving the drug earlier in the course of the cancer would improve survival even more.

"Until today, experimental agents have never been shown to have a survival advantage in this group of patients," said Sartor, who is Piltz Professor for Cancer Research at Tulane. "This potentially represents a new therapy option for these patients who are very difficult to treat. We don't know when this is going to the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] for approval, but we're working very hard to prepare the submission."

A second group of researchers reported that the PCA3 urine test, which measures levels of prostate cancer gene 3, can predict when a biopsy of the prostate gland will come out positive.

The PCA3 gene is overexpressed in men who have prostate cancer, but not in men with benign disease, raising the possibility that the finding may cut down on the number of unnecessary prostate biopsies.

According to study author Jack Groskopf, director of research and development in cancer diagnostics at Gen-Probe Inc., which makes the test, most prostate biopsies that are currently performed after elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test results actually turn out to be negative for cancer.

"The ability of this test to predict biopsies positively could potentially be very helpful and may also may help us identify those more aggressive cancers, which we still do not have a great way to identify other than [with] repeat biopsies," said Vogelzang.

The final prostate cancer study found that short-term hormone therapy -- either before or during radiation therapy -- could help men with intermediate-risk, early-stage prostate cancer live longer and live longer without a recurrence.

But the therapy did not seem to help men with low-risk, early-stage tumors.

Since that study was conducted, however, standard radiation doses to treat prostate cancer have become higher and more efficient, raising the question as to whether these results are applicable to modern-day procedures.

In addition, said study co-author Dr. Christopher Jones, a partner of Radiological Associates of Sacramento, Calif., "there are consequences from short-course hormone therapy such as hot flashes and impotence, and we don't know the long-term effect on sexual function. We need to know if there's a real benefit to the individual patient of adding hormones to radiation before adopting this as standard practice."

A final study demonstrated that adding high-tech urine biomarker tests to regular cystoscopy was not cost-effective in detecting recurrences of bladder cancer. Adding the biomarker screen also increased the risk for false-positive results, the researchers found.

Cystoscopy involves looking at the inside of the bladder with a camera.

"This data suggest that cystoscopy alone remains the most cost-effective strategy," said study author Dr. Jose Karam, a urologic oncology fellow at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "The addition of urine tests adds to the cost without detection of invasive disease, suggesting that we should be using these markers carefully and judiciously when surveying patients with bladder cancer."

Both Vogelzang and Sartor disclosed numerous ties with pharmaceutical companies.

The Genitourinary Cancers Symposium is sponsored jointly by the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the American Society for Radiation Oncology and the Society of Urologic Oncology.

More information

There's more on genitourinary cancers at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

THURSDAY, March 4 (HealthDay News) -- For women who have had breast cancer surgery, the question of whether or not to wait before receiving radiation therapy has been answered by new research that suggests that the longer women wait, the greater the chance of cancer recurrence.

The findings, published in the March 3 online edition of BMJ, are based on an analysis of national cancer records for 18,050 American women who were diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer between 1991 and 2002, at age 65 or older.

All of the women underwent breast-conserving surgery and radiation therapy, but not chemotherapy.

Among the 30 percent of the women in the study who began radiation therapy more than six weeks after surgery, the researchers found that 4 percent went on to develop local recurrences within five years.

The researchers, led by scientists from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, also discovered that the risk of recurrence appeared to decline the sooner radiation treatment began. This suggests that it's a bad idea to wait to begin radiation therapy, and the treatment should start as soon as possible after surgery, the authors of the report noted in a news release from the journal's publisher.

The researchers also found that black and Hispanic women took longer, on average, to begin radiation treatment.

More information

Breastcancer.org has details on radiation therapy  .

TUESDAY, March 2 (HealthDay News) -- Kids exposed to secondhand smoke face a higher risk of developing early signs of clogged arteries by the time they're 13, and are also more likely to have other risk factors for heart disease, Finnish researchers warn.

The authors of the new study examined 494 children and found that those exposed to secondhand smoke between the ages of 8 and 13 were more likely to show thickening of blood vessel walls, a precursor to hardening -- clogging -- of arteries.

The researchers also found that the kids who were exposed to the most tobacco smoke had higher levels of apolipoprotein B, which contributes to "bad" cholesterol, another heart disease risk factor.

"Although previous research has found that passive smoke may be harmful for blood vessels among adults, we did not know until this study that these specific effects also happen among children and adolescents," study author Dr. Katariina Kallio, research fellow at the Research Center of Applied and Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine at Finland's University of Turku, said in a news release from the American Heart Association.

"These findings suggest that children should not face exposure to tobacco smoke at all," Kallio said. "Even a little exposure to tobacco smoke may be harmful for blood vessels. We need to provide children a smoke-free environment."

According to Kallio, Finnish children are exposed to about the same level of secondhand smoke as U.S. kids.

The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on secondhand smoke and kids.

FRIDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Most pancreatic cancer patients die soon after diagnosis, but researchers have identified an oncogene that appears to be a promising new treatment target.

Even more hopeful is that drugs that target this oncogene are already approved to treat rheumatoid arthritis and are undergoing tests with colon and lung cancers, said lead researcher Nicole Murray, an assistant professor of pharmacology and senior associate consultant in the department of cancer basic science at the Mayo Clinic's Jacksonville, Fla., branch.

"Pancreatic cancer is a highly lethal disease," Murray said. "The current chemotherapeutics that we have available have not been very effective."

For the study, published in the March 1 issue of Cancer Research, Murray's team looked at the role the oncogene PKC-iota (PKCi) plays in pancreatic cancer. This gene has already been implicated in colon and lung cancers.

The researchers have been studying another gene called KRAS, which is mutated in 90 percent of pancreatic cancers and controls PKCi, but KRAS has not been easy to target with drug therapy, Murray noted. This is why they decided to investigate PKCi.

They found high levels of PKCi, which predicted poor survival, in most of the pancreatic cancer tumors sampled. Patients with high PKCi levels survived an average of 492 days, compared with 681 days for patients with low levels of the oncogene.

Five-year survival was 10 percent for those with high PKCi levels, compared with 29.5 percent for patients with low PKCi levels, the researchers noted.

In addition, in experiments in both cells and animals, the researchers found that PKCi was essential for the growth of pancreatic cancer cells.

"When we knocked out the PKCi genes in pancreatic cancer cells, we showed that these cells did not grow as cancer cells very well; they didn't invade other tissue very well," Murray said.

"When we put these cells into mice, we showed that not only did the tumors not grow very well, but they didn't metastasize well," she said.

These findings suggest that the arthritis drug aurothiomalate (Myochrysine), which targets PKCi, could effectively treat pancreatic cancer alone or combined with other chemotherapy. It could prevent pancreatic cancer cells from growing or make other chemotherapy more effective, Murray said.

Aurothiomalate is already in a phase I clinical trial for lung cancer patients at Mayo's Minnesota and Arizona sites, Murray said. A phase II trial being planned will combine aurothiomalate with drugs that target other molecules in these cancers, she noted.

It is possible that a future trial will test aurothiomalate in pancreatic cancer patients, she said.

Besides treating pancreatic cancer, PKCi might also be useful in diagnosing the disease, she added.

The findings intrigued William Phelps, program director for translational and preclinical cancer research at the American Cancer Society. "Pancreatic cancer is in dire need of new therapeutic opportunities. Those things we've got don't seem to work well," he said.

Each year, about 40,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer are diagnosed in the United States, and about 35,000 people die from it, Phelps said. "Typical survival after diagnosis is five to seven months," he said.

Pancreatic cancer is particularly resistant to treatment, and most cases are diagnosed when the disease is advanced, said Phelps.

The current drug approved to treat it, gemcitabine (Gemzar), is only minimally effective, Phelps said. "It's not really giving more than a two-month life extension," he said.

Targeting PKCi could be worthwhile, Phelps said. "This looks like a pretty good idea to go forward," he said.

Combining gemcitabine with a drug that targets PKCi could extend life expectancy, Phelps said.

Michelle Duff, director of research and scientific affairs at the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, also finds these results encouraging.

"There is an urgent need for more effective treatment options in pancreatic cancer to improve patient outcomes," she said. "We are eager to see the results of further studies in preclinical models and eventually clinical trials."

More information

For more information on pancreatic cancer, visit the American Cancer Society  .