HIV/AIDS News & Information

Speaker: Deborah Hurst, MD, Senior Director of Clinical Development, Chiron Corporation, Emeryville, California.
Low-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2) (Proleukin, Chiron), when administered in combination with rituximab (Rituxan, Genen-tech/IDEC) produces positive clinical responses in patients with advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), augmenting the antitumor activity of rituximab via expansion and activation of natural killer (NK) cells.

Speaker: Brian I. Carr, MD, Professor of Medicine, Director of the Liver Tumor Service, and Head of the Starzl Transplant Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Glass beads that release highly targeted p-rays from 90yttrium (Therasphere, MDS Nordion) represent an effective and relatively non-toxic treatment option for patients with unresectable and untransplantable advanced-stage hepatocel-lular carcinoma (HCC) [...]

Speaker: Ronald B. Natale, MD, Acting Medical Director, Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center, Beverly Hills, California.
Targeted therapy with the investigational oral epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor inhibitor ZD1839 (Iressa, Astra Zeneca) was able to shrink tumors in some patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were resistant to treatment with more than two prior [...]

Tamoxifen as Standard Adjuvant Hormonal Treatment
Speaker: Eric P. Winer, MD, Director of the Breast Oncology Center, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.
Assessing the use of aromatase inhibitors as adjuvant therapy for women with hormone receptor positive (HR+) breast cancer, an American Society of Clinical Oncology panel stated [...]

Presenter: James Berenson, MD, Medical and Scientific Director, Institute for Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research, West Hollywood, California
Multiple myeloma (MM) is an incurable B-cell malignancy, and resistance develops in nearly all patients. Most patients develop renal insufficiency, which is associated with poor survival.

Presenter: Hagop Kantarjian, MD, Chairman and Professor, Leukemia Department, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas
Nearly 70% of patients with early-chronic-phase CML who receive imatinib mesylate (Gleevec, Novartis) achieve a complete cytogenetic response. After a median follow-up of five years, the annual rate of resistance with progression was 4%, and the annual mortality [...]

Presenter: Azra Raza, MD, Professor of Medicine, and Chief of Hematology Oncology University of Massachusetts, Worcester, Massachusetts
The DNA methyltransferase inhibitor 5-azacytidine (Vidaza, Pharmion) elicits complete and partial hematological responses in about 50% of patients with MDS, improves quality of life, and prolongs the time to AML transformation, compared with supportive care. Thalidomide has produced a [...]