New Hope In The Fight Against Childhood Cancer

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 12 Jul 2013 - 2:00 PDT Current ratings for:
New Hope In The Fight Against Childhood Cancer

Cancer Research UK scientists at the University of Southampton are seeing positive results in a pre-clinical trial that could bring treatments for a particular aggressive form of childhood cancer closer to reality.

Researchers in the Antibody and Vaccine Group have developed two monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) called anti-4-1BB and anti-CD40 and investigated a third called anti-CTLA-4. Each of these antibodies binds to a different target molecule in the immune system, potentially heightening the body's own immune response to cancer.

Published in the July edition of Clinical Cancer Research, the study has shown that the antibodies boost the immune system to fight neuroblastoma - a form of childhood cancer which grows from undeveloped tissue of the nervous system.

They found that 40 to 60 per cent of the tumours treated with the stimulatory antibodies regressed in the laboratory models and ensured long-term survival. With more aggressive tumours, the antibodies alone did not significantly slow tumour growth, however, when the researchers paired one of the monoclonal antibodies with a cancer vaccine called Survivin a similar survival benefit was seen.

Dr Juliet Gray, Senior Lecturer in Paediatric Oncology and Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Southampton, comments: "Although this work is still at a pre-clinical stage, we hope it has enabled us to identify a way that we can provide effective immunotherapy treatment against neuroblastoma. More research is needed to understand how these antibodies work and how they should be used to treat neuroblastoma.

"Six out of ten children with neuroblastoma can be successfully treated with conventional chemotherapy. But for those children who don't respond well to this treatment, immunotherapy could become a vital new treatment option."

The body's immune response is generally much weaker to cancer than it is to infections, and in most cases it does not stop tumours from growing. The body holds anti-cancer cells called T-cells, but cancer has the ability to switch off or subdue the immune recognition in these cells.

The antibodies are engineered to wake the T-cells up from their slumber and thereby restore the anti-cancer activity to attack the tumour. This process is already being used in adult trials for a range of cancers including skin, head and neck and pancreatic cancer. This pre-clinical data will allow Dr Gray and her team to design the first peadiatric clinical trials.

Dr Gray, who is also a paediatric oncologist at Southampton General Hospital, adds: "Neuroblastoma affects around 100 children in the UK each year with most cases being diagnosed under the age of five. It is a serious disease but we need to be clear about how to move forward with it. There are a number of things that make conducting a clinical trial in children very challenging. Therefore, it is important that we learn as much as we can in the lab, in advance of a clinical trial, about how this type of therapy can be best used in childhood cancers."

Cancer Research UK scientist, Professor Martin Glennie, Head of the Cancer Sciences at the University of Southampton, who also worked on the study, says: "We very much hope these results will enable us to develop a pioneering immunotherapy treatment for a childhood cancer. In theory this approach enables us to kill cancer cells without damaging healthy cells, resulting in fewer toxic side effects such as hair loss, nausea and tiredness.

"The next stage of our work will be to see if the treatment is a safe and effective treatment for children and also seek to understand how these antibodies can be used in combination with other treatments to maximise their effect."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
Visit our cancer / oncology section for the latest news on this subject.

The study was funded by Cancer Research UK, Wessex Cancer Trust, and Wessex Medical Research.

Dr Gray’s paper entitled Immunomodulatory Monoclonal Antibodies Combined with Peptide Vaccination Provide Potent Immunotherapy in an Aggressive Murine Neuroblastoma Model is available to read here

University of Southampton

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Study Evaluates The Impact Of Childhood Temperament On Later Alcohol Use/Problems

Main Category: Alcohol / Addiction / Illegal Drugs
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health;  Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 12 Jul 2013 - 1:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Study Evaluates The Impact Of Childhood Temperament On Later Alcohol Use/Problems

Most risk and protective factors for alcohol use have roots in early childhood. In other words, an individual enters adolescence with personality characteristics and life experiences that have accumulated during the first decade of life. An evaluation of measures of temperament from children six months through to five years of age has found that childhood temperament prior to age five predicts adolescent alcohol use and problems at age 15.5 years, even after controlling for socio-demographic factors and parental alcohol problems.

Results will be published in the December 2013 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

"Most scientists who study alcohol use start studying people in adolescence, since that is when alcohol use is usually first initiated/experimented with," explained Danielle Dick, associate professor of psychiatry, psychology and human and molecular genetics with the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as corresponding author for the study. "But people don't enter adolescence as blank slates; they have a history of life experiences that they bring with them, dating back to early childhood. This is one of the most comprehensive attempts to understand very early childhood predictors of adolescent alcohol use in a large epidemiological cohort."

"A question largely unanswered by the existing literature concerns the origins of personality differences in adolescents or adults who do and do not have drinking problems," added Matt McGue, Regents Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Minnesota. "In my opinion, the major contribution of the current study is that it shows that these personality differences emerge very early in life."

Dick and her colleagues used data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a large epidemiological sample of pregnant women with delivery dates between April 1991 and December 1992. The children (6,504 boys, 6,143 girls) were followed longitudinally. Temperamental characteristics were assessed at six time points from six to 69 months of age. Alcohol use and problems were assessed at age 15.5 years.

"Some of the most interesting findings to emerge from this study are that, one, we can identify childhood temperamental styles that emerge prior to age five that predict alcohol use and problems in mid-adolescence," said Dick. "Two, the early childhood temperamental styles that predict alcohol use are very different and largely uncorrelated - that both kids who show consistent emotional and behavioral problems early on are at elevated risk and kids who are consistently sociable at a very early age are also at risk. This indicates very different pathways to alcohol involvement/patterns, that emerge early on, which has important implications for prevention efforts."

"Temperament is considered to represent the biological foundations of later personality and is manifested in terms of basic reactivity and regulatory process," said McGue. "This study differs from other studies in two significant ways. First, other studies have typically focused on personality, which is normally assessed by self-report. This study indicates that those personality factors are the result, in part, of early temperamental expressions. Second, ALSPAC is a large and very well characterized longitudinal study. This allows the investigators to rigorously evaluate their hypothesis as well as provide them with the statistical power they need to explore important ancillary questions, such as whether the nature of personality risk differs in males and females, a gender effect they did not find in this study."

"Interestingly, the association between sociability and alcohol use/problems was more significant than the association found between emotional and conduct difficulties and later alcohol problems, said Dick. "This underscores the fact that drinking during adolescence is largely a social phenomenon. However, this doesn't mean it's less problematic; we know from other studies that most adolescent drinking is high risk - for example, binge drinking - and can lead to numerous negative consequences."

Both Dick and McGue noted the importance of searching for what may lead to adolescent drinking when trying to understand the development of patterns of alcohol use, such as predictors that emerge very early in life.

"That said," noted McGue, "while I think the most important finding concerns tracing personality differences back to preschool differences in temperament, we cannot, from these findings, predict with much accuracy which preschoolers will have problems with alcohol as adolescents and which will not." McGue spoke favorably of unrelated Canadian research that targets personality risk factors for substance abuse; rather than trying to change the personalities of adolescents, scientists are attempting to teach them how to deal with their personalities.

"All things considered," said Dick, "it's not just 'problem kids' who get involved in alcohol use. It's also the highly sociable kids as well. Parents should be aware of this."

Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release. Click 'references' tab above for source.
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Study: Women Who Survived Childhood Cancer Still Have Good Chance Of Conceiving

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Academic Journal
Main Category: Fertility
Also Included In: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 14 Jul 2013 - 0:00 PDT Current ratings for:
Study: Women Who Survived Childhood Cancer Still Have Good Chance Of Conceiving

Researchers have found that although females who survived cancer in their childhood have an increased risk of infertility, they still have a good chance of conceiving.

The study, published in The Lancet Oncology, revealed that around two-thirds of women who suffered from childhood cancer become pregnant. The researchers say this is a pregnancy rate similar to that seen in non-cancer survivors who have received infertility treatment.

Researchers from Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, as well as Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, carried out a survey of participants in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCCS). The study tracks people who were diagnosed with cancer under the age of 21 at over 26 US and Canadian institutions.

The study focused on women who were trying to get pregnant. The researchers analyzed 3,531 women from the CCCS aged between 18 and 39 years who reported being sexually active at some point in their lives, as well as 1,366 of the women's female siblings for comparison.

The results showed that of 455 study participants who reported clinical infertility, 64% of them eventually became pregnant.

The results also revealed that in the youngest group of survivors and their siblings, who were under the age of 24, infertility was almost three times more common in the survivors than in their siblings.

But the results showed that this difference was less pronounced in women in their late 30s. The study authors say this may be because infertility is more common in all women in that age group and is not limited to cancer survivors.

Surprisingly, the study also revealed that although survivors were just as likely as their siblings to seek medical treatment for infertility, the siblings were twice as likely to be prescribed drugs for it.

Dr Sara Barton, the leader of this study, says:

"We do not have data about why providers did not prescribe infertility drugs, but are concerned about a provider bias against treating cancer survivors for infertility.

Perhaps providers assessed the chance of success as poor and therefore decided not to attempt therapy, or perhaps survivors were less motivated to take drugs after previous extensive treatment. Alternatively, reproductive medicine providers might have been uncomfortable with perceived medical comorbidities."

Barton adds that clinicians caring for childhood cancer survivors who request information about the likelihood of pregnancy or the success of infertility treatment have a scarce amount of data on which to provide recommendations.

She adds: "To our knowledge, ours is the first large study of female childhood cancer survivors to quantify the risk of infertility that is based on a clinical definition, and characterizes the use and success of infertility treatments in this setting."

In a comment alongside the study, Richard Anderson of the MRC Centre for Reproductive Health at the UK's University of Edinburgh says: "Barton and colleagues' data highlight the risk of infertility in childhood cancer survivors beyond the risk of ovarian failure and the need for this risk to be addressed by oncologists at the time of diagnosis and during follow-up as a key part of long-term care."

Written by Honor Whiteman

Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today Visit our fertility section for the latest news on this subject. "Infertility, infertility treatment, and achievement of pregnancy in female survivors of childhood cancer: a report from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study cohort", Sara E Barton et al, The Lancet Oncology, July 13, 2013. Link to article. Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:

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