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“We in the medical community have long believed we were caring for these women appropriately and this study determines that these patients over age 65 are being woefully undertreated,” said Dr. Owusu, who runs the ICC’s geriatric oncology program and was lead author of the study. “Going forward we need to develop strategies to improve breast cancer outcomes for these women.”

CLEVELAND – Impaired drivers in Cuyahoga County will be seeing flashing red lights in their rear-view mirrors from Dec. 14 to Jan. 4—but it won’t be Santa or Rudolph: 45 law enforcement agencies will participate in a countywide effort coordinated by the Cuyahoga County DUI Task Force to take impaired drivers off our roads.

While police will be out in force to stop impaired drivers before they can hurt themselves or someone else, we all know that the best way to prevent impaired driving crashes is to keep people from getting behind the wheel after they have been drinking. To stress safe traveling alternatives for the holidays, the Cuyahoga County DUI Task Force and Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, in partnership with MADD, the Greater Cleveland Automobile Dealers’ Association and Liberty Mutual Insurance, are unveiling a new line of ‘designated driver action figures’ at a press event at the Grand Staircase stage at Tower City at 12 p.m. on Monday, December 17.

CLEVELAND – Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center researchers have recently made great strides in stem cell gene therapy research by transferring a new gene to cancer patients, via their own stem cells, with the ultimate goal of being able to use stronger chemotherapy treatment with less severe side effects. Under this protocol, MGMT, a drug-resistance gene, is added into purified hematopoietic stem cells to protect these cells from the damage of chemotherapy regimens.

In one of 24 presentations by Ireland Cancer Center researchers at the annual American Society of Hematology meeting, Stanton Gerson, MD, and colleagues presented that eight patients were enrolled on the trial and six were infused with their own stem cells which were engineered to carry the MGMT gene. In three patients, stem cells carrying the gene were identified in their blood or bone marrow. In one patient, stem cells carrying the gene were detected up to 28 weeks after their administration. This significant finding has never been reported before with this gene and drug combination.

CLEVELAND − Researchers at the Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center are the first in the region to have joined a nationwide clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of a gene therapy in patients with advanced melanoma which is aimed to help a patient’s own immune system fight their cancer. The gene therapy is termed Allovectin-7®, and is injected directly into the cancer while it is still in the body in order to make it appear foreign to the immune system. Previous studies using the gene therapy have shown that injection of a single site of cancer can train the immune system to fight other areas of the disease in the body which have not been injected with the gene.

“Cancer cells often hide from the body’s natural disease-fighting mechanisms because they arise from normal tissue and don’t appear as foreign to the immune system,” said Julian Kim, MD, Chief of Surgical Oncology and lead investigator of the study at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. “The challenge in treating advanced melanoma is to find a way to train the patient’s immune system to recognize cancerous cells as foreign which will help to eliminate them. The concept of injecting a gene into a cancer to make it appear as a foreign tissue essentially creates a personalized vaccine for each individual patient’s cancer. The hope is that the newly formed cancer vaccine will trigger several of the body’s natural immune response mechanisms to recognize and attack the cancer, both within the injected cancer and throughout the body.”