Prostate Cancer Canada Network - Toronto Man to Man

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admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 09:41:58 +0000

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Awareness, The “PCCN – Toronto Man to Man” and “Side by Side” Prostate Cancer Support Groups Newsletter, May 2010

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 13:44:12 +0000

In this Issue:

Man to Man Signs Affiliation Agreement with Prostate Cancer Canada and the Prostate Cancer Canada Network
Our May 2010 speaker: Dr. Robert Nam Discusses Hormone Therapy
2010 Meetings Benefit North York Harvest Food Bank
Thank you to Scotiabank
National Prostate Cancer Conference Coming to Toronto September 22 – 25, 2010
PCC’s Wake Up Call Breakfast Huge Success
Man to Man Vice-Chair Sol Dennis Resigns from Board
Chairman Named to the PCCN Advisory Board
The Ladies of Side by Side
Walking For Chris at This Year’s Walk//Run for Dad
Man to Man Participating in Prostate Cancer Canada’’s WALK//RUN FOR DAD — Father’s Day June 20, 2010
On-going Projects for 2010
Man to Man Board of Directors

Awareness, The “PCCN – Toronto Man to Man” and “Side by Side” Prostate Cancer Support Groups Newsletter (pdf-245kb)

To the men and women in the GTA

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:05:56 +0000

On Friday April 23, 2010, in the “Living” section of the Toronto Star, there was an important announcement about our prostate cancer support group. (Please see below.)

On behalf of our Board of Directors and all our survivors, thank you for supporting our efforts with newly-diagnosed men and their families during our first 15 years.

We look forward to having your continued support as we move forward, perhaps with a new name, but still doing the much-needed work of raising the awareness level of prostate cancer and educating men who are diagnosed with this disease.
________________________________________________________________________________
Since 1994, The Toronto Man to Man Prostate Cancer Support Group has helped thousands of men and their families on their personal prostate cancer journey.

Recently, we joined Prostate Cancer Canada (PCC), the only national foundation dedicated to the elimination of this disease. As a result, beginning this July we will change our name to Prostate Cancer Canada Network–Toronto (PCCN-Toronto). We are confident that, as PCC reaches out to men across Canada, we will be able to connect with more men in the Greater Toronto Area than ever before.

As “Man to Man” is now an extremely well-known name among patients, survivors, and doctors in the Toronto prostate cancer community, we would like to thank everyone who has helped us get the word out during our first fifteen years.

If you or someone you know has prostate cancer please call 416-932-8820 or visit www.pccntoronto.ca for more information on:
- Peer Support meetings (the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of each month)
- Awareness Night meetings (6 times per year)
- Prostate cancer clinics
- Hospital in-patient visits
- Women’s support group meetings (Side by Side)
- Speakers’ Bureau

On behalf of PCCN-Toronto Man to Man and the 1 in 6 Canadian men who will be diagnosed with this disease in their lifetime, I sincerely thank all our supporters and our many volunteers for what you have done, and for all you will do for us in the future.

Aaron Bacher
Chairman, PCCN-Toronto Man to Man

Dr. Trachtenberg Looks Into The Future With New Prostate Cancer Treatment

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:37:48 +0000

Read this article in our Latest Man to Man ‘Awareness’ Newsletter – Sponsored by AstraZeneca
December 2009 (pdf)
In this Issue

Dr. Robert Buckman
Our January 2010 speaker
Thank you to Scotiabank
Dr. John Trachtenberg
M2M loses Philip Taylor
New board member announced
Relay for Life Honours M2M
Successful Conference in NFLD
On-going Projects for 2010
Man to Man Board of Directors

Awareness Night Birthday Celebration – Nov. 25, 2009

abacher — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:32:20 +0000

Special birthday cake celebrating 15 years of educating, raising awareness and support.

Awareness Night – Nov. 25, 2009

abacher — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:14:47 +0000

Our guest speaker Dr. John Trachtenberg.

Team touts cancer ‘lab on a chip’

jstevens — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:11:45 +0000

(M2M comment- Dr. Aaron Wheeler at the Canadian Cancer Society Innovative Research in Cancer Event, Sept. 23, 2009, showed a similar device he is developing to detect Prostate Cancer.)

Joseph Hall HEALTH REPORTER TORONTO STAR

Aaron Wheeler holds a petri dish bearing a lump of breast tissue that resembles, in size and appearance, a piece of chewed gum.

In his right, the University of Toronto chemist holds a microchip array, about the size of a credit card, bearing a drop of red liquid about a thousand times smaller than the glob of flesh. The drop represents the minute amount of cells that Wheeler’s tiny board needs to accurately gauge estrogen levels in a woman’s breast tissue.

The invention holds out the promise in the near future of pocket-sized detectors that could help diagnose and monitor breast cancer, which requires high levels of the female hormone to thrive.

It also earned Wheeler’s U of T team the inaugural front cover of a major scientific journal.

“This is the size of tissue that you would normally need to take out to (determine) estrogen levels,” says Wheeler, holding out the petri dish. “Obviously we can’t routinely be cutting pieces like this out of women’s breasts.”

Wheeler’s work appeared Wednesday on the cover of the first issue of Science Translational Medicine, based in Washington, D.C.

An offshoot of the prestigious weekly Science, the journal spotlights work progressing out of the laboratory into hospitals.

Wheeler freely admits the prominent coverage could help attract investors for his device, which he hopes to couple with emerging microchip analyzer technology to create a pocket-sized screener for breast cancer.

Women with such cancers have much higher levels of estrogen in the surrounding tissue. And there is growing evidence the hormone is greatly elevated in women at risk of developing breast cancer.

Currently, however, these telltale estrogen levels can only be determined by cutting fingertip-sized pieces of tissue out of the breast for lab analysis. Because they’re so painful and disfiguring, however, such tests are rarely done.

Wheeler says his “lab on a chip” technology would require only a fraction of the sample cells, obtained with a simple needle prick.

The device works by using electrical charges to “dance” droplets of liquids on a precise route over the surface of the microchip circuitry.

One solvent droplet is sent over a dried sample of tissue to open up the cellular walls. Another is then sent in to extract the intercellular contents that have been exposed.

That millimetre-wide drop is then directed through another liquid reservoir, which removes all the other cellular materials, leaving only the purified estrogen to carry on.

“Then we pull (the droplet) out and do the analysis,” Wheeler says. This process is currently done by lab technicians and can take several days to produce results.

Wheeler says his results would be available in minutes. Experiments on the tissues of two women with breast cancer have shown that this process extracts enough estrogen to give doctors accurate levels, says Dr. Noha Mousa, the lead study author.

By combining the device with a microchip estrogen detector, the entire process could be exported from lab settings to doctors’ offices.

The pocket-sized devices could be used both to monitor women being treated for breast cancer and as a screening tool, says Mousa.

PMH clinicians map group at high risk for aggressive, hidden prostate cancer

jstevens — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:00:54 +0000

from University Health Network
Clinical researchers at Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) can now answer the question that baffles many clinicians – why do some men with elevated prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels who are carefully monitored and undergo repeated negative biopsies still develop aggressive prostate cancer?

The answer is hidden tumours located on the top of the prostate that evade traditional diagnostic procedures, including ultrasound-guided needle biopsy. The PMH research, published online today in the British Journal of Urology International (BJU 8938), demonstrates that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the best tool to reveal such tumours.

“Our findings identify a specific high-risk group whose tumours are difficult to diagnose because of location. These men benefit from MRI, which guides the biopsy procedure with a high degree of accuracy,” says author Dr. Nathan Lawrentschuk, Urologic Oncology Fellow, PMH Cancer Program, University Health Network. “The research team calls the clinical presentation of elevated PSA and repeated negative biopsy results ‘prostate evasive anterior tumour syndrome’ (PEATS).”

“Knowing about PEATS may also be important for men already on ‘active surveillance’ – patients with slow-growing prostate cancer who are being regularly monitored through PSA testing and biopsy. Every man does not need an MRI, but knowing about PEATS will help us identify those who do,” says principal investigator Dr. Neil Fleshner, Head of the Division of Urology, Princess Margaret Hospital, Professor of Surgery at University of Toronto, and Love Chair in Prostate Cancer Prevention Research.

A team of urologists, surgeons, radiologists and pathologists studied 31 PMH patients who had positive biopsy results and tumours on top of their prostate as shown on MRI. They found that MRI was able to help diagnose hidden prostate tumours 87% of the time.

Dr. Lawrentschuk says clinicians need to be aware of PEATS because these hidden tumours can be aggressive.

About Princess Margaret Hospital
Princess Margaret Hospital and its research arm, Ontario Cancer Institute, have achieved an international reputation as global leaders in the fight against cancer. Princess Margaret Hospital is a member of University Health Network, which also includes Toronto General Hospital and Toronto Western Hospital. All three are research hospitals affiliated with the University of Toronto. www.uhn.ca

Analyzing Cancer Cells to Choose Treatments

jstevens — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:00:01 +0000

Microfluidics chips allow scientists to study circulating cancer cells and determine their vulnerabilities.

By Emily Singer from MIT Technology Review

In a new clinical trial for prostate cancer, scientists will capture rare tumor cells circulating in patients’ blood, analyze them using a specialized microchip, and use the results to try to predict how well the patient will respond to a drug. The trial reflects a new phase of personalized medicine for cancer, enabled by microfluidics technologies that can isolate scarce cancer cells and detect very small changes in gene expression.
Physicians ultimately hope these chips can become a routine part of clinical care for cancer. “We need to be able to profile the tumor at the time we are considering treatment,” says Howard Scher, chief of the Genitourinary Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where the trial will take place.

Cell circuits: Scientists will use the Fluidigm chip (above) to analyze tumor cells isolated from the blood of patients with prostate cancer. The array comprises a matrix of integrated channels and valves (center) housed in an input frame and can run 9,216 parallel reactions.
Credit: Fluidigm

The study will focus on men with a difficult to treat form of prostate cancer that has failed to respond to other therapies. Changes in gene expression might help determine whether a specific drug will be effective–for example, if a patient has high levels of a receptor for androgen hormones, a drug that inhibits signaling of that receptor is more likely to work well. “We want to know why they don’t respond to therapy and what therapies would be best for them,” says Martin Fleisher, chairman of the Department of Clinical Laboratories at Sloan. “We collect tumor cells from blood, and do a gene analysis to find out what genes are overexpressed and whether or not they would be candidates for certain types of targeted therapies that would beat down their cancer.”

The effectiveness of different cancer drugs can vary based on the molecular characteristics of the cancer, such as the presence of a certain hormone or genetic mutation. Physicians already do some molecular analysis of cancer tissue to select the best drug for a patient. Herceptin, for example, is used to treat breast cancer in women with a particular protein in their tumors. And lung cancer patients with a mutation in the gene for the epidermal growth factor receptor are more likely to respond to a drug called Iressa than patients without it. But these treatments are chosen based on analysis from tumor biopsies, which isn’t always possible.

Analyzing tumor cells in blood presents two major challenges. Tumor cells are found at very low concentrations in the blood–about one in ten million cells–making it difficult to isolate them. And the small numbers of cells must be analyzed in very low volumes. In the last year, Sloan scientists and others have developed ways to capture these cells using antibodies that detect a molecular marker present only in cancer cells.

In the new Sloan study, scientists face an even more challenging problem–they must detect differences in gene expression, rather than a specific genetic mutation, such as the mutation linked to Iressa responsiveness in lung cancer. Scher and collaborators will use a microfluidics chip made by Fluidigm, a South San Francisco, CA- based company . DNA from each cell is filtered into one of 96 tiny channels on one side of the chip, while reagents flow in from 96 channels on the other side. A precise plumbing system then combines the molecules in different combinations, generating about 9,000 simultaneous reactions. Each reaction takes a volume of just nanoliters–about the size of a period–rather than the microliter volume typical of most commercial fluidics devices. The chip, which costs about $300, “can detect differences in gene expression that are as subtle as twofold with very good accuracy,” says Gajus Worthington, Fluidigm’s president, CEO, and co-founder.

Researchers plan to analyze levels of about 30 genes in each patient, including genes involved in production of testosterone and in cell signaling. Expression of these genes has been shown in animal models to predict how well a tumor will respond to a drug called dasatinib, which is approved for treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia and in late stage clinical trials for prostate cancer.

The microfluidics technology could also be used to examine other properties of tumor cells. Scientists might look for changes in gene expression that suggest a cancer has metastasized, or whether a tumor has evolved specific mutations that make it resistant to specific drugs.

Microchip spots cancer quickly and painlessly

jstevens — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:00:22 +0000

by Megan Ogilvie & Joseph Hall
Toronto Star

Toronto researchers have developed a portable device they say will accurately diagnose prostate cancer in 30 minutes.

The microchip technology, created by a pair of University of Toronto scientists, will be able to determine the severity of the tumours through a simple urine sample and produce quick diagnosis with no need for painful biopsies.

Now heading into the engineering stage, a BlackBerry-sized device should be available for doctors’ use within two to three years and eventually could be tuned to detect a broad range of cancers and infectious ailments, the researchers say.

“The goal would be to produce a result … while you’re sitting in the waiting room,” said engineering professor Ted Sargent, who holds the U of T’s Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology.

A paper on the work was published yesterday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The device uses a fingertip-sized microchip – fitted with microscopic meshing – programmed to detect DNA sequences and proteins uniquely produced by specific cancers or pathogens.

These “biomarkers” would be drawn from urine or blood samples.

“We simply put a sample on the chip and we have a nice small chip reader that then analyses it and tells you what markers are in the sample,” said Shana Kelley, a U of T pharmacology professor and study co-author.

Detected markers can tell you not only which kind of cancer is present, but also the stage and severity the tumour has attained.

“That’s very important to be able to do that because cancers are actually a bunch of different diseases with different levels of aggressiveness,” said Kelley. “Particularly in prostate cancer, there are very non-aggressive forms … that you simply want to leave alone.”

Kelley said the technology could herald an age of surgery-free diagnosis for cancer patients. “The real drive is toward non-invasive diagnostics so we can just screen people without having to take parts of their organs in order to do it,” she said.

Dr. Tom Hudson, scientific director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, said the study is “proof of principle” that it is possible to have a quick, affordable technology that can test for different cancer biomarkers at once.

“This is a critical step,” he said. “They have shown you can detect this gene mutation (for prostate cancer). And if you extrapolate that you can do it for one gene, you could probably do it for 100 or 1,000.”

Scientists are working hard to identify biomarkers for specific cancers and test those markers’ usefulness in diagnosing cancer in patients. Some 1,000 biomarkers have been found, but Hudson said only nine of those have been validated so far in the clinic.

The other challenge is to find a way to test for many different biomarkers at once and develop a cost-effective technology to do it.

Hudson cautioned the device is still a long way off from being a staple in doctor’s offices.

“How we make these (biomarker) tests happen in the clinic or in the clinical lab really needed some advances in technology. And Kelley and Sargent have done all the proof of principles here for a technology that’s going to work.”

For the initial work, Sargent and Kelley looked at prostate cancer, which has a set of signature biomarkers, shown in many studies to accurately portray the presence and severity of that disease.

The pair showed the chips were well able to pick up these makers in the minuscule concentrations typically found in the urine of prostate cancer patients.

But even now, Kelley said, they are shifting the technology’s sights to other cancers and ailments.

“We’ve already done a little bit of work with head and neck cancer,” Kelley said. “But really any cancer where there is an established molecular profile, we should be able to pick up using this device.”

Sargent said he envisions the devices being a commonplace tool in doctors’ offices around the world, along with a binder full of chips for different cancers and diseases.

“Say you were looking for H1N1 (influenza) or some dangerous infectious agent, there could be chips specific to those,” he said. “You would just insert the proper one.