* 70-year-old battling cancer completes 56th marathon

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PORTLAND, Maine (NEWS CENTER) — Among the thousands of runners who ran in the Maine Marathon, one 70-year-old runner was running for a cause very close to him.

Don Wright suffers from Myeloma, an incurable form of blood cancer.  When he was diagnosed in 2003, he set out to run a marathon in each of the 50 states.  The Maine Marathon is his 56th marathon in his 38th state. Wright is running for Team Continuum, a non-profit that raises money to help cancer patients and their families pay their bills.  His campain slogan is his goal: to “E-Race Cancer”.

“I like to think sometimes as I’m running along that I’m just sticking it right in the cancer’s eye,” Wright said.

Team continuum has a Facebook page, and for every “like” the page receives, $5 will be donated to the non-profit.

NEWS CENTER

* He has every reason to run

September 30

He has every reason to run

By Glenn Jordan gjordan@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

Don Wright received his cancer diagnosis the same month as his first marathon medal.

click image to enlarge

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Don Wright

At the time, Wright was 62. Patients with myeloma, a blood cancer that affects cells in the bone marrow, could expect an average of another five years of life.

For Wright, that was eight years and 54 more marathons ago.

He plans to go after No. 56 Sunday morning at the Maine Marathon and Half Marathon, which starts and finishes near Back Cove in Portland.

“I’ve been given extra years of life,” Wright said Thursday while on his way east from his home in Minnesota. “I feel like I need to do the best I can with them, to make it an active and enjoyable life.”

Wright, 70, will be one of approximately 3,500 runners heading north on Route 1 Sunday morning in the 20th edition of the event. About 2,300 will turn around on Route 88 in Falmouth and head back to Portland to complete a half marathon. About 1,200 will continue through Cumberland Foreside to Yarmouth before looping back to Back Cove.

The main beneficiary from this year’s event is Camp To Belong Maine, an organization that brings together siblings separated by foster care or other out-of-home care.

A host of other charities use the Maine Marathon to raise money, most notably the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training Program.

Since 1997, participants in the Maine Marathon, Half Marathon and Relay have raised more than $2.6 million.

Wright is running for Team Continuum, a nonprofit dedicated to helping cancer patients and their families with immediate, vital, nonmedical financial assistance. His campaign is called E-Race Cancer and for every “like” on his campaign’s Facebook page, sponsors will donate $5 to Team Continuum.

A mostly retired computer consultant and lawyer whose treatment consists of a daily pill that doesn’t cure his myeloma but helps keep it in remission, Wright tries to eat only organic food.

His wife Ardis and daughter Sarah will accompany him to Maine. Both plan to run the half marathon.

Wright hadn’t run regularly since high school before taking it up again after turning 60.

“I just wanted to lose weight and be healthy and strong,” he said. “Then when I got into it, I found that I really enjoyed it.”

He built up to marathon distance with the goal of qualifying for Boston. It didn’t happen that first marathon, but he qualified later the same year and ran the 2004 Boston Marathon.

His best time was 3 hours, 36 minutes at the 2006 Twin Cities Marathon when he was 65. As the marathons piled up, he started thinking about joining the 50 states club. That, and a conversation at a hematology conference last winter, led to the fundraising campaign.

Two weeks ago at a marathon in Erie, Pa., Wright checked off his 37th state. Maine will be 38. His upcoming schedule includes Hartford, Conn. (Oct. 15), Washington, D.C. (Oct. 30) and the New York City Marathon (Nov. 6).

“I feel like I’m a very lucky beneficiary of recent research and development in cancer medications,” he said. “We certainly are spending a lot of time enjoying the life that we have. As you can tell, it’s a very active life.

Staff Writer Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or at:

gjordan@pressherald.com

Twitter: GlennJordanPPH

* Turning Point: Cancer diagnosis hasn’t slowed down dedicated marathoner from Lake Elmo

St. Paul Pioneer Press

9/16/2011

Turning Point: Cancer diagnosis hasn’t slowed down dedicated marathoner from Lake Elmo

http://www.twincities.com/ci_18903940?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com

By Rhoda Fukushima

Don Wright (Debra Gendel)

Don Wright of Lake Elmo ran his first marathon, Grandma’s Marathon, in June 2003. That month, he also was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow. Since then, Wright, now 70, has run 54 marathons in 36 states. He wants to do a marathon in every state. Today, Wright plans to run the Erie Marathon in Pennsylvania.

“I wasn’t expecting cancer at all. My family doesn’t have much cancer. When I got the diagnosis, I was scared. But I felt good. It was easy to be in denial, and I was, at first.

“After the initial shock, my reaction was to see if I could qualify for and run the Boston Marathon in 2004. I ran eight 20-mile runs between Grandma’s Marathon (in June) and Twin Cities Marathon (in October). I had qualifying times for Boston twice – at the Twin Cities Marathon and at the Tucson Marathon in December 2003.

“The doctor was totally supportive of my running. He believed it would strengthen my bones. I believe that, too.

“At that point and even yet, the myeloma hasn’t caused any symptoms. It was caught at an early stage. It was two more years before we started treatment.

“I started taking Thalomid. It didn’t do anything but give me a rash. I tried the supplement curcumin, but it didn’t do any good.

“In March 2008, my doctor put me on an experimental drug called pomalidomide. I have been stable ever since. I take that pill every night before I go to bed.
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“When I ran my first marathon, I was thinking, ‘Why on earth would anyone do this?’ It’s a lot of hard work and pain. When I got across the finish line, I knew I would be doing another one.

“Running is emotional, spiritual. Something just draws me to that long run. When I’m running, my mind is free to roam. I can just sort of float across the ground. I love that feeling.

“A friend of my dad’s once told me, ‘I was always ready for a marathon.’ I liked that sentiment. Now, I am always in marathon-ready shape.

“We do this as a family. My wife and daughter run either the marathon or half-marathon. That’s part of the joy.

“I train on the Gateway Trail, and we recently discovered the Lake Elmo Park Reserve. We enjoy running on the trails. This is the time of year to run in the park.

“I like to run when it’s cool. In summer, that means morning runs. In winter, we often go to the Stillwater Dome and run on the indoor soccer track. I’ve run a 20-miler in there. It’s not the most enjoyable thing, but it gets the job done.

“We are very careful about what we eat. We avoid gluten because there is some indication gluten can affect some myeloma patients in a negative way. We also buy organic food.

“I deal with injuries all the time. Name a runner’s injury, and I’ve had it. Sometimes, we have to take time off. Right now, I’m fighting a little injury, a pulled muscle in my abdomen. I’ve been going to the health club to run on the elliptical machines.

“We get to races at least one day early. We try to drive the race course and get a feel for the community. We’ve learned a lot of geography.

“My myeloma is stable. When I was diagnosed, the median survival time was eight years. Now, the median survival time has increased greatly because of new drugs.

“I feel great. Life is good.”

GT answers FDA questions for LuViva PMA application

GT answers FDA questions for LuViva PMA application

http://www.medicaldevicedaily.com/servlet/com.accumedia.web.Dispatcher?next=bioWorldHeadlines_article&forceid=76690

By AMANDA PEDERSEN

September 6, 2011

Medical Device Daily Senior Staff Writer

Guided Therapeutics (Norcross, Georgia), a developer of a rapid and painless testing platform that uses biophotonics for the early detection of disease, says it has answered all of FDA’s key questions regarding the company’s premarket approval (PMA) application for the LuViva Advanced Cervical Scan.

“We are pleased to provide the FDA with the additional information the agency requested and within the time period required to maintain the PMA application under active review,” said Mark Faupel, PhD, president/CEO of Guided Therapeutics. “The FDA will review our submission, we hope move forward with the PMA process and schedule a panel meeting date, although the agency has the option to ask for additional information.”

LuViva scans the cervix with light to identify cancer and pre-cancer painlessly and non-invasively, the company noted. Guided Therapeutics’ biophotonic technology is designed to distinguish between normal and diseased tissue by detecting biochemical and morphological changes at the cellular level. Unlike Pap or HPV tests, LuViva does not require laboratory analysis or a tissue sample, is designed to provide results immediately and eliminate costly and painful unnecessary testing, the company said.

Faupel told Medical Device Daily that the sequence of events with FDA so far has followed a “normal” track. “There are a number of people at FDA involved in formulating questions both with regard to the clinical side of the clinical trial and technical side of the instrumentation,” he said. There were several questions the company had previously dealt with by submitting draft responses and the majority of those were accepted on what Faupel referred to as a “first round.” There was one question, however, that the agency asked for additional information on which Guided Therapeutics says has now been dealt with. He declined to say what that issue was for competitive reasons. Now the company just has to wait and see if and when a panel meeting is scheduled.

“It was a necessary and major step in getting us closer to that panel meeting,” Faupel said.

The company submitted its PMA application about a year ago (Medical Device Daily, Sept. 28, 2010). In its pivotal trial, more than 1,600 women at risk for cervical disease were tested with the device. According to the company, the device detected cervical disease up to two years sooner than a Pap test, HPV test, colposcopy or biopsy and it detected 86.3% of cervical disease cases that had been missed by these other methods. Also, the device would have reduced the number of unnecessary biopsies by about 40%.
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The fact that the questioning phase of the process was so involved simply reflects that the company has a “fairly high visibility product with a lot of reviewers” involved, Faupel said. “They are more involved in the questions . . . leadership at FDA is very conscious now of the issues that have occurred in the past.”

While it waits for a panel meeting to be scheduled, Guided Therapeutics continues to make progress with its planned international launch and have orders in place with distributors for demonstration and clinical units for Europe and Asia, Faupel said.

“This is a product that we feel strongly will have a home not just in the U.S.,” Faupel told MDD. “It was designed to be low cost, easy to use, easy to train the user, [and] easy to interpret the results.”

Such features are what sets the technology apart from existing testing methods, he said.

“The current standard of care involves a lot of human interaction and data,” he said. He added that an initial PAP test, which requires a highly trained technician to interpret and that another test involving a magnified view of the cervix requires a well-trained physician to interpret and is subjective. “They all involve a lab delay to get a final answer, where as with our product you get a final answer at the point of care.”

The company was recently awarded $517,000 to fund the third year of a $2.5 million three-year grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The grant provides additional resources to help commercialize and bring the LuViva to market. The company has been awarded more than $6 million in six consecutive grants from the NCI to develop the new test for detecting cervical disease since 2001 (MDD, Aug. 26, 2011).

In a multi-center clinical trial, with women at risk for cervical disease, the technology was able to detect cervical cancer up to two years earlier than conventional modalities, according to published reports.

The company has also entered into a partnership with Konica Minolta Opto (Tokyo) to develop a non-invasive test for Barrett’s esophagus using the technology platform.

“This is a platform technology and we believe it can be utilized to detect nearly 90% of all cancers in the body,” Faupel said.

In fact, the company has already begun human testing of its light-based technology for Barrett’s Esophagus, a precursor for esophageal cancer. The feasibility study is designed to test the concept of using the platform for the detection of changes in esophageal tissue. The study also tests various hardware and procedural configurations and is designed to determine a way forward for product development and further clinical trials. The feasibility study is expected to enroll about 40 subjects and be completed before the end of the year. It is being conducted at two Atlanta-area clinics (MDD, Aug. 11, 2011).

Experiment seeks blood test for breast cancer

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News

Experiment seeks blood test for breast cancer

Tue, Mar 09 14:08 PM EST

http://us.mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/AnyArticle/p.rdt?URL=http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6283XR20100309

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An experimental approach that looks for the DNA leaking out from dead and dying cells may provide a route to a blood test for breast cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

An initial study showed the test detected 70 percent of breast cancer cases, and correctly cleared 100 percent of women who did not have breast cancer, the team at Chronix Biomedical, a privately-owned company in San Jose, California, said.

The experimental test is not ready to develop into a product but provides a basis for further research, they wrote in the journal Molecular Cancer Research.

“It is based on finding the unique DNA fingerprints from dead and dying cells,” Chronix CEO Howard Urnovitz said in a telephone interview.

Technological advances in DNA sequencing made the test possible, Urnovitz said. His team sequenced the entire genomes of 26 breast cancer patients and of 67 apparently healthy women.

They were looking for extra DNA in the blood of the breast cancer patients that would come from cells dying because of the tumors.

“If a breast cell is injured, it will overexpress the genes that make it a breast cell,” Urnovitz said. In theory, if a patient has excess DNA from breast cells that are dying, there is something going on that is killing breast cells.

The search is not easy. “The entire genome can be found in the blood,” Urnovitz said. And billions of cells die every day in the human body.

But eventually the Chronix team found what they believe is tell-tale DNA from dying breast cells.

“This study supports the potential of an entirely new approach to identifying cancer at its earliest stages when therapies may be most effective,” Dr. William Mitchell of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

SCREENING AND MONITORING

“Laboratory tests using this approach may have the potential both to screen large populations for cancer before symptoms appear and to monitor patients for the recurrence of cancer once treated,” Mitchell added.

Much more testing needs to be done, Urnovitz said. But so far the test seems to specifically home in on breast cells. Unpublished data shows, for instance, that the DNA signature is not found in men with prostate cancer.

The cost of genetic sequencing will have to come down more before the test would be practical, Urnovitz added.

His team used Roche AG’s 454 sequencer at a cost of thousands of dollars per person, but companies are working to speed up sequencing and get the costs down.

The tests might be used to screen women for breast cancer and to tailor treatments, Urnovitz said.

“Imagine we can come in and say ‘you have damage to the protein kinase gene that would preclude you from these 10 cancer drugs, but here are 20 others that should work’,” he said.

“You would be selecting drug treatment based on each person’s lesions. This would be a really good example of personalized medicine.”

Urnovitz also hopes such a test could monitor patients who have completed treatment for cancer. Instead of coming to a cancer center to undergo a PET scan to check for tumors that may have returned, patients could get a blood test at their convenience and have it sent in for analysis.

“You could have one blood test for everything that is going on,” he said.

(Editing by Paul Simao)

* Doctors Tame One Of Cancer’s Deadliest Forms

Doctors Tame One Of Cancer’s Deadliest Forms

by Richard Knox

Listen Now   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99970093

or download here http://planetcommunications.us/media/20090129_me_07.mp3

Documentary filmmaker Hardy Jones was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in his late 50s. New drugs have helped him keep the cancer at bay for more than five years.

Morning Edition, January 29, 2009 · The chances of surviving cancer have been increasing in recent years. One of the most dramatic success stories in cancer care involves a little-known cancer called multiple myeloma that had been among the deadliest types of the disease.

Myeloma is a painful bone marrow cancer that affects white blood cells that make antibodies. When these cells become malignant, they crowd out other bone marrow cells. That weakens bones so much that patients can break a bone just stepping off a curb.

Hardy Jones, a documentary filmmaker and recreational surfer, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma when he was almost 60. He knew something was wrong when he lost his usual energy.

“I just couldn’t get that stoked feeling, no matter what I did,” Jones says. “I was just always draggin’.” He could barely trudge up the hill from his favorite surfing beach, carrying his surfboard and wet suit.

His doctor ran some tests and mentioned that Jones might have cancer. While waiting for the results, Jones started reading up on possibilities. Some were scary.

“I vowed that I would go in there and no matter what the diagnosis was, I’d be cool,” Jones says. “And when the doctor said, ‘Well, it’s multiple myeloma,’ I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ I totally cracked. I wasn’t cool. But he said, ‘Stop it! Stop it! This is not a death sentence!’ ”

Not any more.

Fighting Myeloma With Drugs

Now there are easy-to-take drugs that can keep myeloma at bay for years.

“Everybody responds, and the majority have a very significant response,” says Dr. Ken Anderson of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “So it’s clearly a new day in myeloma.”

Anderson says the big breakthrough came a decade ago. Cancer research pioneer Dr. Judah Folkman of Harvard, who died last year, suggested that doctors try treating myeloma with thalidomide. The notorious drug caused an epidemic of birth defects when doctors prescribed it to prevent morning sickness in pregnant women 50 years ago.

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Successes like this touched off an explosion of drugs effective against myeloma, some related to thalidomide and others that work in a different way.

“The excitement here is that we have six new treatment options that we didn’t have only five years ago,” Anderson says. “And we have three additional treatment strategies that are in the last stages, so-called phase three clinical trials, that likely will create additional options.”

Having drugs to mix and match gives myeloma patients hope of remissions even after they relapse — something unusual in cancer treatment.

“It really offers for us the opportunity to treat patients even when their myeloma has come back not once, but perhaps even many times,” Anderson says.

Avoiding Bone Marrow Transplants

Doctors can’t yet cure myeloma, but they’re turning it into a disease that patients can live with for many years. The median survival rate has recently increased from about three years to seven or eight.

U.S. and French researchers are about to launch an international study to see if the new drugs are better than bone marrow transplants, which put patients through a grueling regimen of toxic chemotherapy. Officially, transplants are still the first-line treatment for myeloma, although many patients such as Jones are looking at transplants as a last resort.

“Now the question becomes relevant: Do you actually need a transplant?” Anderson says. “That question couldn’t even have been asked before.”

The picture isn’t all positive. Dr. Brian Durie of the International Myeloma Foundation says more patients are being diagnosed with the disease.

“In the United States, there are approximately 20,000 new patients diagnosed each year,” Durie says. “The incidence used to be 12,000 new cases a year. So it’s a significant upward trend.”

But Dr. Vincent Rajkumar of the Mayo Clinic says the increase in numbers is from aging of the population, not a real increase in the rate of myeloma.

There’s also debate about whether environmental toxins are causing myeloma.

“The commonest chemical that has been linked to myeloma is dioxin,” says Durie. That’s why some Vietnam veterans are thought to have gotten myeloma — from exposure to Agent Orange. The Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged the link.

But among the civilian population, the picture isn’t as clear. Some studies are emerging that civilians exposed to herbicides and pesticides do have a higher risk of myeloma. But it’s difficult to pin down people’s exposures to environmental toxins and relate those exposures to the incidence of a rare disease.

The bottom line is that experts say it’s too soon to conclude that environmental toxins are the cause.