On the pulse

Cancerkin’s News….
Some banking exposure…
Lloyds TSB has publicised Cancerkin as part of marketing their banking support to charities. Cancerkin has appeared in a promotional video which is shown in branches of the bank and now posted on the news section of our website. A Cancerkin session features on the back of Lloyds’ charity customer brochure which gets wide distribution. And Lloyds has also made a generous £1,000 donation to support Cancerkin’s valuable work.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Lloyds for their continued support and the publicity they have given us.

Portugal Villa on Ebay…
There are only 4 days remaining to bid for a holiday in a luxury 10 bed Villa in Portugal. The villa holiday has been donated to Cancerkin by one of our supporters as a fundraising drive on eBay. We are looking to raise £2,000+ to put towards Cancerkin’s work for the rest of 2010. If you would like to bid, or know anyone else who may benefit from this offer please follow this link.

We would also like to thank our generous supporter.

If you have anything that you would like to donate for us to auction on eBay please let us know.

Hyde Park Walk…
Entries to this years Cancerkin’s Hyde Park Walk have been coming in steadily and we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support! If you have not sent your form in yet, don’t worry, there is still time. We will be accepting applications right up until the day of the walk.

If you know of anyone else who would like to get involved please let us know and we will send them the information. To begin your sponsorship campaign, please download the form from our website.


In the News…
Could breast cancer treatment in the future be tailor-made?
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, tracked nearly 1,200 women who were diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. This form of cancer is often referred to as pre-cancer as the dangerous cells have not yet moved outside of the milk duct. An increase in mammogram use has meant that these cancers are detected early and so most of the women are at low risk from ever developing aggressive cancer. However because there are currently no ways to identify which lesions pose the biggest threat, most women chose to treat the threat aggressively, undergoing a combination of lumpectomy and radiation or opting for mastectomy.

The researchers collected data on 1,162 women diagnosed with D.C.I.S. across 63 San Francisco-area hospitals, following their progress for an average of 8 years. Three specific “biomarkers” which predicted higher risk of invasive cancer were identified. According to the researchers’ frameworks, if all three of these markers were present, a woman had a 20 percent individual risk of developing invasive cancer over the next 8 years. Similarly, when all the markers were negative, her risk of invasive cancer was only 4 percent. The report published online at The Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that 28 percent of the women in the study fell into the high-risk category and that currently in general cancer treatment, women with breast cancer are not typically tested for these ‘biomarkers’, called p16, COX-2 and Ki67.

Dr. Karla Kerlikowske, professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Centre. “If we can define a woman’s risk a little better then we can personalize what they want to do.”Dr. Susan Love, clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, not involved in the study said this: “It’s a great study and a good example of how we can decrease overtreatment by identifying markers which can tell us which lesions are the good ones versus which are likely to become invasive and deserve more aggressive treatment,”
The study is limited by its relatively small size and the fact that the women studied received only lumpectomy with no other therapy, which is not the standard treatment for women today. Typically, women with D.C.I.S. get lumpectomy and radiation or mastectomy. Furthermore the positive biomarkers predicted risk for invasive cancer but failed to indentify increased risk for recurrent D.C.I.S.
To read the full article please click here

Lauren Newton 29th April 2010
l.newton@cancerkin.org.uk