News About Cancer

Promising News for Kidney Cancer Patients

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reported that bevacizumab, a molecularly targeted drug, slowed the growth of tumors in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer in adults. Results of the randomized clinical trial were presented at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Orlando, Fla.
In patients receiving the high dose of bevacizimab, tumor growth was significantly slowed down - it took 5 months to observe measurable growth of the tumor compared with 2 months in patients receiving placebo. A positive but smaller effect on tumor growth was also seen in patients receiving the lower dose of bevacizumab.

"Melanoma: Watch Your Back"

These days it's not only the suspicious stranger lurking behind your back that you have to watch. In the United States, you are more likely to run into trouble from a melanoma on your back, the most common location of this potentially deadly skin cancer.

Each year over a million people in the United States alone will be diagnosed with skin cancer. Of these, approximately 80,000 will be afflicted with melanoma. The incidence or the number of new cases of melanoma per year continues to rise. One in seventy-one persons born in the year 2001 will develop melanoma over their lifetime. Although it is not the most common skin cancer, melanoma is the most aggressive and has the ability to spread to other parts of the body.