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Access Pharmaceuticals Provides Update On ProLindac(TM) Phase 2 Ovarian Cancer Trial And Clinical Development Plan
ACCESS PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.(OTC Bulletin Board: ACCP), provided an update on the progress in the Company"s clinical development plan for ProLindac, a novel DACH platinum drug that has shown to be active in many solid tumor types in human clinical studies. Access recently announced positive safety and efficacy results from its Phase 2 monotherapy clinical study of ProLindac(TM) in late-stage, heavily pretreated ovarian cancer patients. In this study, 66% of patients who received the highest dose achieved clinically meaningful disease stabilization according to RECIST criteria. No patient in any dose group exhibited any signs of acute neurotoxicity, which is a major adverse side-effect of the approved DACH platinum, Eloxatin, and ProLindac was well tolerated overall. The Company has scaled up manufacturing in order to begin the next phase of clinical development. Access plans to conduct several combination trials in different solid tumor types both as Company-sponsored trials and in conjunction with its two previously announced co-development partners.
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Republicans Playing 'Abortion Card' On Health Reform, American Prospect Opinion Piece States
The "religious right and its Republican enablers" are "playing the abortion card" with health care reform legislation by contending that "federal government dollars will pay directly for abortions," according to an American Prospect opinion piece by Dana Goldstein, an associate editor for the magazine. It is "unlikely" that federal money would be used this way, but the groups "want grassroots conservatives to believe it will, hoping the resulting outcry will scuttle attempts to reform our expensive health care system," Goldstein continues. She writes, "This rhetoric is beyond hyperbolic -- it is downright deceptive."Goldstein quotes Adam Sonfield, a senior policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, who said discussion of family planning in federal law ""never includes abortion."" She adds, "In actuality, "family planning" language refers exclusively to contraceptive services, in part because of the Hyde Amendment," which bars the use of federal Medicaid dollars for abortion. She also notes that reproductive health issues are "so politicized ... that even to offer birth control to poor women who do not meet Medicaid"s strict eligibility requirements, individual states must apply for a waiver from the federal government." About half of states have done so, she says. In "choosing what services to cover under any potential public insurance plan," the HHS secretary "will likely be bound by all of the existing laws that prevent the federal government from financing abortion," according to Goldstein. She adds, "None of these restrictions would be explicitly overturned by any of the health reform proposals currently being considered in Congress."Antiabortion-rights Senate Republicans have said they will oppose any health reform bill "that subsidizes abortion coverage or even includes, in the proposed health insurance exchanges, private insurers that cover abortion," Goldstein writes. She adds that 87% of existing health plans include some abortion coverage, meaning that most women would lose coverage under the Republicans" demands. "The result would be a near-blanket restriction on women"s access to insurance-subsidized abortion, one far more radical than the Hyde Amendment," Goldstein says. Meanwhile, women"s health advocates have said that overturning the Hyde Amendment is not currently their top priority because "they are simply too busy playing defense on health reform" and do not have the votes, Goldstein writes.According to Goldstein, by "playing the abortion card, the real goal of anti-choicers is not only to maintain existing restrictions on abortion access, but to use health reform as a vehicle to expand them to the majority of American women." She writes, "If such efforts lead to legislative impasse, many conservatives will be delighted." She concludes, "After all, they"ve never really put any political muscle behind fixing our inadequate health care system" (Goldstein, American Prospect, 7/14).
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Florida State University Scientists Unveil New Seasonal Hurricane Forecasting Model
Scientists at The Florida State University"s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) have developed a new computer model that they hope will predict with unprecedented accuracy how many hurricanes will occur in a given season.
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Pitt Researchers Find Promising Candidate Protein For Cancer Prevention Vaccines

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have learned that some healthy people naturally developed an immune response against a protein that is made in excess levels in many cancers, including breast, lung, and head and neck cancers. The finding suggests that a vaccine against the protein might prevent malignancies in high-risk individuals. Mice that were vaccinated to boost their immune response against this cell cycle protein, called cyclin B1, were able to reject a tumor challenge in which they were exposed to a cancer cell line that overproduced it, explained senior author Olivera Finn, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Immunology at the Pitt School of Medicine. The results are reported this week in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Cyclin B1 is known to be produced in excess amounts in several kinds of cancer," she said. "While we were studying it, we noted that many healthy people already had an immune response, or antibodies, against the protein, even though they"d never had cancer." According to the researchers, the immune response most likely developed during a childhood viral infection, when inflammatory responses are strong. Cells infected with chicken pox virus, for example, look very much like tumor cells because they, too, overproduce cyclin B1. The virus actually packages the host protein, which ultimately gets shown to the immune system as a marker of infected cells that must be destroyed. "Because cyclin B1 is a "self" protein, there have been concerns that boosting the immune response against it would produce autoimmunity and create new problems," Dr. Finn said. "But now that we know that perhaps 20 to 30 percent of people already recognize it as abnormal when made in excess, we can be more confident about the safety of a vaccine strategy to immunize high-risk groups against it." She is working with collaborators to open, by the end of the year, a clinical trial of a cyclin B1 treatment vaccine in lung cancer patients, and she plans to assess it in the future as a prevention strategy in patients with pre-malignant lung lesions. Natural immunity to other tumor-specific proteins has been found before, Dr. Finn noted. Her team developed a vaccine to boost response against MUC1, a protein that is abnormally produced in colon cancer and in precancerous polyps. The MUC1 colon cancer prevention vaccine is being tested in a clinical trial led by colleagues at UPMC. "In previous work, we found that women who developed an immune response to MUC1, typically after pelvic surgery, mumps or mastitis, have a much lower risk for ovarian cancer," Dr. Finn said. "Cyclin B1 and MUC1 are part of a big family of self-proteins that become over-produced during cancer development, so they have great potential as targets in prevention vaccines." Other authors of the paper include Laura A. Vella, Ph.D., and Min Yu, M.D., both of the Department of Immunology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine; and Steven R. Fuhrmann, Ph.D., Moustapha El-Amine, Ph.D., and Diane E. Epperson, Ph.D., all of the IOMAO Corp., Gaithersburg, Md. The research was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute Special Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in Lung Cancer and the Dana Foundation. As one of the nation"s leading academic centers for biomedical research, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine integrates advanced technology with basic science across a broad range of disciplines in a continuous quest to harness the power of new knowledge and improve the human condition. Driven mainly by the School of Medicine and its affiliates, Pitt has ranked among the top 10 recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1997 and now ranks fifth in the nation, according to preliminary data for fiscal year 2008. Likewise, the School of Medicine is equally committed to advancing the quality and strength of its medical and graduate education programs, for which it is recognized as an innovative leader, and to training highly skilled, compassionate clinicians and creative scientists well-equipped to engage in world-class research. The School of Medicine is the academic partner of UPMC, which has collaborated with the University to raise the standard of medical excellence in Pittsburgh and to position health care as a driving force behind the region"s economy. For more information about the School of Medicine, see www.medschool.pitt.edu. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine


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