ABC News reports: Senate Votes for FDA to Regulate Tobacco

Years in the Making, Senate Votes to Give FDA Power to Regulate Tobacco

Times have changed now that even tobacco states have smoking bans. Today, after two weeks of wrangling and a decade of considering the change, the U.S. Senate endorsed increased regulation of tobacco.

Senators voted 79-17 to regulate tobacco in the same way the government regulates everything else you put in your body -- from Froot Loops to aspirin.

At Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, organization president Matthew L. Myers called the vote "a truly historic victory" and "the strongest action Congress has ever taken to reduce tobacco use."

"Forty-five years after the first U.S. Surgeon General's report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer, the most deadly product sold in America will no longer be the least-regulated product sold in America," Myers said in a statement.

The bill would give the federal government the power to regulate cigarette ingredients, to ban the marketing of "light cigarettes" and to require graphic warning labels.

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The New York Times: George MacPherson, Theater Producer, Dies at 78

George MacPherson, a theater producer who helped bring down the curtain on bus-and-truck road shows and usher in the big-box-office age of polished national touring companies, died on Wednesday in Orangeburg, S.C., where he lived. He was 78.

The cause was lung cancer, said his daughter, Morag.

Mr. MacPherson, who got his first taste of show business glamour as a veterinarian with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, helped theater producers maximize returns on their shows by sending out touring companies with high production values and first-rate performers to markets beyond the big cities.

This approach, restructured in the early 1980s at American Theater Productions, where he was executive director, led to increased subscription sales and a boom for the tour business, which nearly doubled its gross revenues from 1988 to 1991.

“In those days, touring was pretty rudimentary,” said Miles Wilkin, the chief executive of the tour producer Broadway Across America. “George was adept at working with New York producers, acquiring shows and then realizing their full potential on the road.”

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Men with cancer bond in support group

It was about five years ago when Walt Beigegrain flopped onto his bed, crossed his arms and felt a lump on his chest.

“What is that?” he wondered. About five weeks later, after summoning the courage to seek help, his doctor initially confirmed that yes, he had a lump, but it couldn’t be breast cancer, because men don’t get breast cancer. Another physician echoed those same thoughts.

However, tests showed a different story, and Beigegrain’s breast cancer was in Stage II, which is a treatable phase.

“I figured, ‘So what, I have breast cancer,’ ” he said. “I can deal with that.”

Beigegrain did deal with that. He had the tumor removed in surgery. He now can talk openly about his breast cancer, but he knows other men suffer alone after being diagnosed with breast cancer or any other form of the disease.

They needn’t.

For the past few years, a local all-male group, Men Against Cancer Helping Others, or MACHO, has been attracting more members than any of the numerous cancer-support groups for women organized through St. Mary’s Hospital, said Debra Hesse, coordinator of cancer survivor programs for St. Mary’s Cancer Center.

At a recent meeting, men gathered around tables at a coffee shop near the hospital and greeted one another with strong handshakes and pats to the back.

Dressed in blue jeans, button-up shirts or T-shirts and sneakers or hiking boots, the men stick to an agenda that usually includes a guest speaker and review of a book related to cancer.

But outside of those general guidelines, men said they’ve grown to feel free to be themselves, and conversations can include guys asking each other advice about their battles with similar forms of cancer or tips on how to be a better husband to a spouse with the disease.

But the reason the meetings work, they said, is because a group dynamic helps ease the stigma men feel about getting cancer.

Also the focus is neither a “prayer session, or a pity party,” they said.

“The male instinct is, if there’s a problem, I need to fix it,” said Michael Appel, the lead pharmacist who helps run meetings.

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Science Daily reports: Stem Cell Protein Offers A New Cancer Target

A protein abundant in embryonic stem cells is now shown to be important in cancer, and offers a possible new target for drug development, report researchers from the Stem Cell Program at Children's Hospital Boston.

Last year, George Daley, MD, PhD, and graduate student Srinivas Viswanathan, in collaboration with Richard Gregory, PhD, also of the Stem Cell Program at Children's, showed that the protein LIN28 regulates an important group of tumor-suppressing microRNAs known as let-7. Increasing LIN28 production in a cell prevented let-7 from maturing, making the cell more immature and stem-like. Since these qualities also make a cell more cancerous, and because low levels of mature let-7 have been associated with breast and lung cancer, the discovery suggested that LIN28 might be oncogenic.

Now, publishing Advance Online in Nature Genetics on May 31, Daley, Viswanathan and colleagues show directly that LIN28 can transform cells to a cancerous state, and that it is abundant in a variety of advanced human cancers, particularly liver cancer, ovarian cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia, germ cell tumors and Wilm's tumor (a childhood kidney cancer). They believe that overall, LIN28 and a related protein, LIN28B, may be involved in some 15 percent of human cancers. By blocking or suppressing LIN28, it might be possible to revive the let-7 family's natural tumor-suppressing action.

"Linking this protein to advanced cancer is a very exciting new result," says Daley, Director of Stem Cell Transplantation at Children's, and also affiliated with Children's Division of Hematology/Oncology, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "It gives us a new target to attack, especially in the most resistant and hard-to-treat cases."

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Science Daily reports: Brain Irradiation In Lung Cancer

A national Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) study led by a Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Center physician at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee has found that a course of radiation therapy to the brain after treatment for locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer reduced the risk of metastases to the brain within the first year after treatment.

"With improved treatments for non-small cell lung cancer, patients are living longer and we are seeing more brain metastases," says study author Elizabeth Gore, M.D. "This study compared the efficacy of prophylactic (preventive) cranial irradiation (PCI) vs. observation in these patients, and found that those not receiving cranial irradiation were two and one-half times more likely to develop brain metastasis than those who did."

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