Men with early stages of prostate cancer who delay radical treatment in favor of an approach of “expectant management” do not have high levels of anxiety and distress. That is the conclusion of a new study published in the September 1, 2009 issue of Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study’s results suggest that living with untreated cancer is not upsetting for many patients with early prostate cancer.

Investigators at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), along with collaborating teams at the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Michigan, have completed the first large- scale, multi-institutional study of prostate cancer death after standard treatment to remove the prostate since PSA screening has become widely used as a method to screen for the disease.

CytRx Corporation (NASDAQ: CYTR), a biopharmaceutical research and development company engaged in the development of high-value human therapeutics, announced that results demonstrating that its cancer drug candidate INNO-206 caused statistically significant tumor shrinkage in an animal model of ovarian cancer have been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Investigational New Drugs.

Ovarian cancer kills approximately 15,000 women in the United States every year, and more than 140,000 women worldwide. Most deaths from ovarian cancer are caused by tumors of the serous histological type, which are rarely diagnosed before the cancer has spread.

Current diagnostic tests for ovarian cancer are woefully ineffective for early detection of the disease, say researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. A new study finds that in order to make a significant dent in the mortality rate for the deadly cancer, the tests would have to be able to detect tumors of less than 1 cm in diameter, or about 200-times smaller in mass than those currently used to assess potential new tests.

Scientists in the US suggest that current tests for diagnosing ovarian cancer are not good enough and we need to develop better ways of detecting the disease much earlier. The study is published on 28 July in the open access journal Public Library of Science and is the work of researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and the non-profit Canary Foundation, an organization dedicated to the early detection of many types of cancer.

Scientists from the Université de Montréal and McGill University have re-engineered a human enzyme, a protein that accelerates chemical reactions within the human body, to become highly resistant to harmful agents such as chemotherapy, according to a new study published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry. “Our team modified and decoded an enzyme structure,” says Joelle Pelletier, a professor at the Université de Montréal’s Department of Chemistry.

DLX5, a gene crucial for embryonic development, promotes cancer by activating the expression of the known oncogene, MYC, according to researchers from Fox Chase Cancer Center. Since the DLX5 gene is inactive in normal adults, it may be an ideal target for future anti-cancer drugs, they reason. Their findings are published in the July 31 edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, available online now.

A new study by researchers at the Georgetown’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center finds a higher level of common household pesticides in the urine of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer that develops most commonly between three and seven years of age. The findings are published in the August issue of the journal Therapeutic Drug Monitoring.

ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARIA) announced preliminary clinical data from an ongoing Phase 1 clinical trial of its investigational, multi-targeted kinase inhibitor, AP24534, in patients with advanced hematological cancers.