HPV may be linked to cancer of the lung (HealthDay)

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter by Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter - Mon Apr 4, 11: 48 pm EST

(Monday 4 April HealthDay News) - the human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually transmitted virus that accounts for most cases of cervical cancer, can also play a role in cancer of the lung, researchers report.

In other smaller studies, HPV found in patients with lung cancer. But what role plays the virus, if any, in the development of the disease is not known, scientists from the International Agency for research on Cancer (IARC) stated.

"These results preliminary mandate more investigations on the role of HPV in lung cancer,", said principal investigator Devasena Anantharaman, a postdoctoral fellow in the genetic epidemiology group, which is part of the CIRC.

"However, to determine the physical presence of the virus in these Lung Tumors and other established markers of cancer related to HPV are necessary to establish a causal link," Anantharaman said.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, held in Orlando, Florida Monday

For the study, the Anantharaman team sought 1,633 to 2,729 people without pulmonary disease HPV types in patients of lung cancer.

The researchers found that people without lung cancer had fewer types of HPV that patients with lung cancer. In patients with lung cancer, the chances of having eight serious HPV types have been significantly increased, the researchers added.

The strongest risk factor for lung cancer is smoking, however, this did not account of infection increased HPV, the authors of the study noted. The link between HPV and lung cancer remained current and former smokers as nonsmokers. The results are the same for men and women, said Anantharaman.

Types of HPV high risk, including HPV16 and HPV18, represent approximately 70 percent of cervical cancers. Types of low risk, HPV6 and HPV11, cause disorders such as genital warts and have also been observed in respiratory papillomatosis, which is a mild lung disease, Anantharaman said.

There is a vaccine to prevent HPV, but if the same vaccine would be any lung cancer is not clear, said Anantharaman.

"This study aims to report the observed associations." If these indicate that a causal relationship remains to be established, "he says. "I understand the interest in HPV vaccination." However, any interpretation in the light appears to be drawn by the hair at the moment. ?

The study was funded by the CIRC.

Dr. Luis e. Raez, co-leader of the Group of Thoracic Oncology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of medicine, said that "this association is not sufficient to establish causation."

However, this initial conclusion is quite interesting to serve as a basis for further studies designed to confirm the link, he said. "Maybe this virus is linked to lung cancer," said Raez.

"If this virus is really linked to lung cancer, perhaps you can vaccinate smokers with HPV vaccine and you can prevent lung cancer," he said.

They note that research presented at meetings was not submitted to rigorous review before publication in a medical journal.

More information

To learn more about HPV, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Report blasts is the problem of Cancer Research Grid

The National Cancer Institute is reassess a broad computing grid used for research on cancer, following an assessment by its Board of scientific advisors that the draft is riddled with problems. NCI has invested more than 350 million dollars in the project, called caBIG, including nearly 200 million dollars over the past two years.

CaBIG, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, meaning is a pilot project launched in 2004, whose purpose was to provide a computing shared for biomedical research and develop software tools and standard formats for the exchange of information. Funded by the NCI Cancer Centers across the United States, including the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, have access to caBIG via 145 nodes of the network. CaBIG includes "workspaces, nine" which support research in the life sciences, clinical trials, banks of tissue and pathology and other areas.

Following his appointment in July, Director of NCI Harold Varmus has undertaken a review of four months of caBIG, and this review was completed in February by a group of work of the Council of the Institute of scientific advisers. The Working Group, in a report published last month, showed that less than a dozen cancer centers are using the management of clinical data of the caBIG tools or its cloud computing infrastructure. And while acknowledging that caBIG has had a "positive influence" on the establishment of standards for the exchange of data, the Working Group has criticized program for straying from its objectives initial and sprawling in a too complex "enterprise software" of more than 70 applications.

CaBIG is administered by the NCI of Biomedical Informatics Centre and it. The 10-member working group, composed of experts with degrees in science and medicine, found that management structure for the caBIG program became bureaucratic and suffers from "very high" costs generals. The program has increased too quickly without careful prioritization or a profitable business, according to the working group model. Lead contractors are Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC-Frederick and Sapient.

The NCI Board issued 10 recommendations for corrective action. They include an immediate moratorium on all the caBIG software development, including ongoing projects in commercial contracts. a moratorium of one year on all new projects and contracts; an audit of the expenses of caBIG to date; and the creation of an independent oversight committee.

Report of the Working Group detailed a long list of problems with the program. Some applications caBIG cost millions of dollars for the construction. The price tag for a, caArray, a system of management of the data in table, was $ 9.2 million. Other software is overdesigned, difficult to use, or lack of support and documentation. For these reasons and others, a majority of 32 life science "bench to bench" research tools developed for caBIG had limited use or impact, the report.

Only seven of the 51 centres funded by participating in caBIG NIC cancer uses the program cloud computing infrastructure, caGrid. Twenty others are on route to caGrid, but this brings the total to slightly more than half of these centres. Among the issues cited as obstacles are caGrid is too complex and has not been adequately tested for safety. Even the University of Chicago, which contributed to the development of caGrid, is not its use.

"There is always an example of how not to run a program, it can be," said Michael Biddick, President and CTO of Fusion PPT, a systems integrator working with government agencies. Biddick is a contribution InformationWeek editor who has written on caBIG. "The failure to link the mission objectives to technology shows how important acceptance by users and buy-in can be," he said.

Efforts to build a community of users of caBIG autour, which include strategic planning meetings and monthly conference calls, were also found to be missed. An annual meeting to advance the agenda has been described in the report by a participant not identified as "frenzy of food on the contractor". In addition to three major prime contractors, twenty other providers are involved with caBIG.

The NCI report describes the administration of the program of the caBIG as having a "very complex organizational structure" and said that information on the programme budget had been inconsistent and difficult to decipher. The Working Group has determined that the money paid to Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC-Frederick and Sapient over the past seven years more than $ 60 million and is "probably much more". It considers that the total expenditures on caBIG to be at least $ 350 million for the years 2004 to 2010, including about 100 million dollars in federal stimulus funds.

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Oracle, Moffitt collaborate on Cancer informatics system

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Slideshow: Health it stimulates the Patient Care, SafetyAs part of a continuing effort to provide patients with cancer more personalized care, Moffitt Cancer Center, and Oracle are working together on a new computer health system and research.

Scalable and secure, system built with Oracle health sciences technology, support of Moffitt Total Cancer Care program, which is a comprehensive approach to provide individualized, based on evidence for cancer patients.

This implies Moffitt-with the consent of the patients-grouping and analysis of data related to diagnostics, treatment, follow-up and bio-specimens and other sources clinical, thousands of individuals treated in 18 cancer treatment hospitals in the United States participating in the program of Total cancer care.

Among the Oracle products and technologies that are used by Moffitt for her "generation health and computer research system" are Oracle Health Sciences Enterprise Healthcare Analytics suite, Oracle Healthcare Master person Index, Oracle 11 g database and Oracle Fusion Middleware componentssaid Kris Joshi, Oracle VP of strategy of health care products.

Oracle and Moffitt are working on adding new information sources data model Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation, including sequencing DNA related to patient tissue, including malignant tumours.

This system will be also supports the analysis of data from DNA sequencing with several other sources of information on patients, including e-health records in the hope of obtaining an overview more rapid on the effectiveness of treatments, Joshi, said in an interview.

For example, the analysis could provide new findings on the efficacy of cancer treatments on patients with common biomarkers and other similarities, allowing researchers and clinicians more progress quickly treatments customized for other people. Work underway at Moffitt "gives an overview of the integrated future of cancer care" and the treatment of other diseases, for example, says Joshi.

Moffitt also uses the Oracle Data Warehouse Foundation Healthcare model to normalize and aggregate information so that the quality of the data is optimal for analysis. "You want to compare apples with apples, step of apples with oranges,"then that analysis of data on patients, Joshi said.""

For example, if two different laboratories performing the same express test results in different values, such a milligrams versus micrograms, the data must be standardized so that the statistical calculations are accurate analysis. "A doctor may look both test results and understand, they are the same, but once these different values on the whole, it is difficult to fix," he said. Oracle platform transforms and normalizes the data so that the analysis is correct, he said.

Moffitt, based in Tampa, Florida, is a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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Oracle, Moffitt collaborate on Cancer informatics system

(click the image for a larger view)
Slideshow: Health it stimulates the Patient Care, SafetyAs part of a continuing effort to provide patients with cancer more personalized care, Moffitt Cancer Center, and Oracle are working together on a new computer health system and research.

Scalable and secure, system built with Oracle health sciences technology, support of Moffitt Total Cancer Care program, which is a comprehensive approach to provide individualized, based on evidence for cancer patients.

This implies Moffitt-with the consent of the patients-grouping and analysis of data related to diagnostics, treatment, follow-up and bio-specimens and other sources clinical, thousands of individuals treated in 18 cancer treatment hospitals in the United States participating in the program of Total cancer care.

Among the Oracle products and technologies that are used by Moffitt for her "generation health and computer research system" are Oracle Health Sciences Enterprise Healthcare Analytics suite, Oracle Healthcare Master person Index, Oracle 11 g database and Oracle Fusion Middleware componentssaid Kris Joshi, Oracle VP of strategy of health care products.

Oracle and Moffitt are working on adding new information sources data model Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation, including sequencing DNA related to patient tissue, including malignant tumours.

This system will be also supports the analysis of data from DNA sequencing with several other sources of information on patients, including e-health records in the hope of obtaining an overview more rapid on the effectiveness of treatments, Joshi, said in an interview.

For example, the analysis could provide new findings on the efficacy of cancer treatments on patients with common biomarkers and other similarities, allowing researchers and clinicians more progress quickly treatments customized for other people. Work underway at Moffitt "gives an overview of the integrated future of cancer care" and the treatment of other diseases, for example, says Joshi.

Moffitt also uses the Oracle Data Warehouse Foundation Healthcare model to normalize and aggregate information so that the quality of the data is optimal for analysis. "You want to compare apples with apples, step of apples with oranges,"then that analysis of data on patients, Joshi said.""

For example, if two different laboratories performing the same express test results in different values, such a milligrams versus micrograms, the data must be standardized so that the statistical calculations are accurate analysis. "A doctor may look both test results and understand, they are the same, but once these different values on the whole, it is difficult to fix," he said. Oracle platform transforms and normalizes the data so that the analysis is correct, he said.

Moffitt, based in Tampa, Florida, is a National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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Vanderbilt launches Cancer decision Support tool

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Slideshow: Health, it stimulates the Patient Care, SafetyVanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) has launched the nation first cancer personalized decision support website which will allow to collect and distribute information on the growing list of genetic mutations which impact on various cancersas well as to provide links to research papers on the various treatment options based on specific mutations.

The online tool, my Cancer genome, is linked to StarPanel electronic medical record (EMR) database of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, giving doctors the ability to refer patients, the results of laboratory medical history, medications and other medical information with data that allows to follow the latest developments in personalized medicine online from cancer and clinical research.

In an interview with InformationWeek, William Pao, Associate Professor of medicine and Director of personalized medicine for cancer to the VICC, said that the cancer research community provides that landscape is likely to become more complex as new clinically relevant mutations are discovered.

"We aspire to be the site of reference, so that the up-to-date data on clinical associations between mutations and therapeutic results will be easy to find," said Pao. "An approach genetically informed cancer medicine is currently in its infancy, but promising results using this approach, we anticipate that it will become more widely adopted."

PAO also noted that widespread adoption of a genetically informed occur approach, it will be important that persons making clinical decisions, as well as patients, the information that they need at their fingertips. "We hope that this website will provide information to date to help people make informed treatment decisions," he said.

To help speed processing decisions based on the best available scientific data, physicians who receive a tumour laboratory results showing a mutation in a specific gene that is relatively rare profiling can log on to my Cancer genome tool and, in a few minutes, find the latest information on the clinical implications of the gene.

The doctor may then recommend the treatment that is currently available or refer the patient to a clinical trial that is testing targeted for the gene therapy. Patients can also visit the VICC Web site and learn more about their cancer using the online tool.

"Once we test tumor of the patient for specific mutations, test results of remaining in a patient's medical record, as well as new treatments become available for each mutation, our physicians will have this information at your fingertips.""Mia Levy, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and medicine clinical Informatics Officer and VICC cancer, said in a news release.

The first two forms of cancer featured on information tool my Cancer of the genome of the CIVC are melanoma and lung cancer.

"In the future, will the Web site have more content, not only on lung cancer and melanoma, but the cancer of the colon, thymic carcinoma and other malignancies, breast cancer" said DTP. "We hope eventually make searchable data so that people can type in their type of cancer and their tumor mutations to find relevant clinical information about their specific disease." In the end, the Web site could become a collaborative tool among the cancer community to accelerate the development of therapies and improve outcomes for patients, "Added Pao."

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