| ID cancer early, then get yearly screenings
A smile stretched across Bill Nevels' youthful face as he reminisced about peeking into George Steinbrenner's office. As he tells it, the New York Yankees owner had left early because his team was losing, and Nevels' grown son's connections got them the sports equivalent of a backstage pass. A sports fan extraordinaire and longtime grade school coach, Nevels, 72, isn't short on sports stories and he has a zest for telling them. But nearly a decade ago, as he was just getting into retirement, Nevels wasn't sure how many big-time sporting events he'd be able to make. He had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He underwent external beam radiation followed up with brachytherapy in which radiation oncologist Dr. Marc Apple implanted tiny "seeds" in Nevels' prostate that emitted a controlled dose of radiation.
Elekta Announces First Two Clinical Sites Using VMAT Cancer Treatment ...
ATLANTA, Jan. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Elekta, a world leader in clinical solutions for radiation therapy and radiosurgery, announced today that two sites are utilizing Elekta technology to implement clinical treatments with Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT)*. With the recent CE designation of VMAT in Europe, the way has been cleared for The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, UK and General Hospital Vienna in Austria to treat cancer using Elekta's VMAT solution. VMAT is a significant improvement to existing advanced radiation therapy techniques, often referred to as IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) and offers a faster alternative to helical tomotherapy. With Elekta's VMAT technology, the target continuously is radiated while the source of the beam is rotated around the patient in single or multiple arcs.
Common Molecule Notifies Immune System Of Prostate Cancer
In experiments with mice, researchers have found that the body's immune system can use a surprisingly common molecule to recognize prostate tumors. The molecule comes from a protein found in all cells of the body; however, immune cells appear to respond to it only when it is present on the surface of cells within a tumor.Understanding how this protein, known as histone H4, signals the immune system to respond to malignant cells may help researchers refine immunotherapy strategies that harness the body's own immune system to fight tumors. Some types of immunotherapy are already being tested in patients, but many questions remain unanswered. In particular, researchers want to know if tumor cells display molecular signposts that tell the immune system, "I'm a cancer cell, destroy me."Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator James P.
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