Toronto, Canada — The announcement of what is destined to be the world’s largest golf fundraising event ever: Golf to Conquer Cancer presented by Harry Rosen. On a single day, this one-of-a-kind nationwide fundraising event will unite thousands of Canadian golfers of all skill levels, as well as the golf industry and other corporate sponsors, to help conquer cancer. On Thursday, July 25, 2013, golfers from across Canada will step up.

All that is needed to participate are four golf clubs and a commitment to raise funds for cancer research. “One of the best things about Golf To Conquer Cancer is the format: The 4-Club Challenge,”commented Ian Leggatt, former PGA Tour champion. “It’s great for all skill levels, but more importantly, it’s designed to be played in four hours, all while raising funds to conquer cancer.”
Golf To Conquer Cancer offers a compelling format designed to challenge golfers of all levels.

Players each choose only four clubs and work as a team within their foursome to determine their strategy for the day as well as for each hole. Interested golfers can register as a foursome or as an individual at www.golftoconquercancer.ca. Golfers will be grouped into foursomes to participate in the 4-Club Challenge that will be the format of Golf To Conquer Cancer.

Hundreds of courses across Canada will host the inaugural Golf To Conquer Cancer event. Participants choose the area where they want to play and then select a participating course. New host golf courses are being added daily, so interested participants should visit the website regularly.

Harry Rosen Inc. is the national presenting sponsor for this national fundraising event, TaylorMade is the official golf equipment sponsor and the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) is the primary Canadian golf industry partner.

In Ontario, net funds will benefit The Campbell Family Cancer Research Institute at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Outside of Ontario, all net funds will be granted to researchers working in the province or region where the funds are raised.

At the request of The Campbell Family Cancer Research Institute, the Canada-wide Terry Fox Research Institute’s eminent researchers will determine where to allocate net funds in each province or region where they are raised.

Dr. Benjamin Neel, Director of The Campbell Family Cancer Research Institute, said, “Today, researchers are embarking on a new era of discovery with Personalized Cancer Medicine. Events like Golf to Conquer Cancer have a major impact on the resources needed to conquer cancer.”

Larry Rosen, Chairman and CEO of Harry Rosen Inc., stated, “We are very excited to be the presenting sponsor of this wonderful new event and to support the groundbreaking work that is being done at The Campbell Family Cancer Research Institute and across the country. Cancer is a cause that my colleagues and I care about deeply and have supported for many years. We hope that with this new initiative, we can all work together to achieve the collective goal of conquering cancer.”

“We are so excited to launch Golf to Conquer Cancer, the world’s largest national golf fundraising event,” stated Paul Alofs, President and CEO of The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. “It is a unifying event. It is uniting golfers on a single day, uniting golf courses right across Canada and, in fact, is uniting Canada. And we’re all united in conquering cancer.”

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Life Technologies Corporation will exhibit products across the spectrum of basic, translational and clinical cancer research during the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2012, taking place March 31 – April 4, in Chicago, Illinois. In addition, several of Life’s customers and collaborators will present research findings.

“From basic discovery of biomarkers to validation of new drug targets and the application of genomic sequencing in clinical trials, Life Technologies provides optimized solutions specific for cancer research,” said Ronnie Andrews, president of medical sciences at Life Technologies. “We share with our customers a commitment to accelerating our scientific understanding of cancer, driving to a world in which cancer becomes a manageable disease.”

DNA sequencing live on the Ion Bus – The Ion Bus offers a unique opportunity to view the game-changing Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) system in action. The Ion Bus will be parked outside the Chicago Hilton at the intersection of Wabash and Balboa streets. The Ion Bus will be open for tours from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., April 1 – 3.

Presentations:

Triple negative breast cancer - Triple negative breast tumors, which make up nearly 20 percent of breast cancers, do not respond to treatment with targeted therapies such as Herceptin (trastuzumab).

To investigate new options for these patients, the first clinical trial of whole-genome sequencing for women with triple negative breast cancer was initiated in March 2010; early results will be presented by John Carpten, Ph.D., head of the Integrated Cancer Genomics Division at the Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) on Monday, April 2 at 10:30 a.m. Life Technologies is supporting the study, which is revealing the diversity of genetic mutations in triple negative tumors.

Semiconductor sequencing of melanoma samples – George Watts, Ph.D., research assistant professor and co-director of the Genomics Shared Service at The University of Arizona Cancer Center, will present a poster demonstrating accurate, cost-effective sequencing of six commonly mutated genes in archived research samples from metastatic melanoma patients using the Life Technologies Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) system.

The authors state that the study represents proof of principle for “next-generation sequencing to provide robust detection of mutations in fixed tumor samples.” The poster will be presented April 2, Monday morning, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

AmpliSeq panels accurately identify more than 700 mutations in patient samples – Marilyn Li, Ph.D., professor of molecular and human genetics and director of the Cancer Genetics Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, will present a poster demonstrating use of the Life Technologies Ion AmpliSeq cancer panels to sequence 12 archived tumor research samples including FFPE, bone marrow and cell line samples.

The authors report that the panel accurately identified all known mutations previously detected using Pyrosequencing or Sanger sequencing and was sensitive enough to detect mutations at frequencies as low as 5% with 99% confidence. The poster will be presented April 3, Tuesday morning from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Single tube, ultra-multiplexed PCR with Ion AmpliSeq technology for amplicon resequencing on the Ion Personal Genome Machine System – Gianluca Roma, a senior product manager at Life Technologies, will present data highlighting the accuracy, simplicity and speed of mutation detection in research oncology samples using the Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) and Ion AmpliSeq cancer panel (see below). Roma will present a poster April 3, Tuesday morning from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

New Products:

Life Technologies offers cancer researchers the ability to detect mutations in cancer-associated genes using both PCR and sequencing platforms.

castPCR – TaqMan Mutation Detection Assays can help detect 44 mutations in three key cancer genes (BRAF, EGFR, and KRAS). In April 2012, Life will expand the number of assays covered by the existing/current research tool to an additional 241 key mutations in another 21 cancer genes. Powered by an innovative technology known as competitive allele-specific TaqMan PCR (castPCR technology), these assays help researchers detect key mutations in the highly heterogeneous samples typical of cancer tissue.

AmpliSeq panels – The Ion AmpliSeq Cancer Panel, made available for sale in the fall of 2011, allows scientists to sequence dozens of genes in cancer research samples within several hours, starting with as little as 10 ng of DNA. The panel detects more than 700 mutations across 46 known cancer genes. This week, Life Technologies announced the availability of Ion AmpliSeq Custom panels, which will allow researchers to design custom panels for genomic regions up to 250 Kb in size, expanding to 1 Mb later in 2012.

These products are available as Research Use Only, Not for Diagnostic Use.

Visit Life Technologies in Booth #4419 on the Exhibits floor of McCormick Place West. For more information about Life Tech activities at AACR Annual Meeting 2012, please visit:

http://www.lifetechnologies.com/global/en/home/about-us/news-gallery/events/Join-Life-Technologies-at-AACR.html?CID_AACR_blog_32012

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A new patent has been issued to Moffitt Cancer Center for a computerized system that efficiently selects the right patient for the right clinical trial.

The newly patented system matches the registered patient’s own molecular profile – warehoused in a database of thousands of patient-donated biological tissue or tumor samples – to the molecular design of the drug aimed at targeting their disease at the molecular level, and do it quickly. The system promises to accelerate clinical trials and help shorten the time that it takes to get critically needed new drugs into the market.

Getting new drugs to market to fight cancer and other serious diseases requires, on average, 15 years. The drug development process is long and complex, but the three-phase clinical trials process – estimated to take up to half of those 15 years – is often the bottleneck in getting innovative drugs to the patients who need them.

Clinical trials, increasingly becoming more expensive, are also multifaceted. While patients may qualify for a clinical trial based on their age or stage of disease, they may not be, over the long term of the trial, the best candidates to test a drug. Adverse events, changes in a patient’s health status and the potential for a drug not being effective for them slow the process.

Although patients may have met the trial protocol’s criteria, the drug may not be right for them because their molecular profile is not a good match for the chemical and molecular properties of the drug. Because the concept of personalized medicine is selecting the right drug for the right patient, innovations have been needed to bring personalized medicine to reality. Personalizing the selection process for clinical trials is a vital step.

With the development of new and better ways to examine and understand a tumor’s molecular profile, matching the right patient to the right clinical trial becomes increasingly important. But handling the massive data evaluation necessary to accomplish this has been a stumbling block.

The newly patented computer system, Patent Number US 8,095,389 B2, or “Computer Systems and Methods for Selecting Patients for Clinical Trials,” is designed to surmount that problem.

The newly patented computer system is designed to:

• Select patients to clinical trials matching an individual’s/drug’s molecular profile
• Match patients to clinical trials by a patient’s disease/diagnosis
• Match patients to clinical trials by their symptoms
• Match patients to clinical trials by their demographic information and family history
• Track a clinical trial participant’s disease progression compared to drug efficacy

The newly patented computer system and associated products, such as operating system, software, interfaces and data retrieval system, improve clinical trial selection efficacy by making the patient selection process less random and more selective. The technology has the potential to refine clinical trials by eliminating bottlenecks, overhauling the selection process and shortening the timeline, ultimately bringing new drugs to market more efficiently.

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Researchers at the University of Michigan Health System have found a new indicator that may predict which patients with a common type of throat cancer are most likely have the cancer spread to other parts of their bodies.

Patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma who had “matted” lymph nodes – nodes that are connected together – had a 69 percent survival rate over three years, compared to 94 percent for patients without matted nodes, according to a study published online ahead of print publication in Head & Neck.

The oropharynx is an area that includes the back of the tongue, soft palate, throat and tonsils. ”The spread of cancer throughout the body accounts for about 45 percent of the deaths from oropharyngeal carcinoma,” says the study’s senior author, Douglas B. Chepeha, M.D., M.S.P.H., an associate professor of otolaryngology head and neck surgery at the U-M Medical School.

“Our findings may help doctors identify patients who are at higher risk for having their cancer metastasize and who would benefit from additional systemic therapy. Conversely, some patients without matted nodes may benefit from a reduction of the current standard treatment, which would cut down on uncomfortable side effects.”

Notably, the findings indicate an increased risk independent of other established prognostic factors, such as the patient’s history of smoking or whether they have the Human papillomavirus (HPV), the study found. Smoking (tobacco and marijuana), heavy alcohol use and HPV infection have each been linked to the development of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma.

Matted nodes appear to be an especially strong indicator of increased risk among patients who are HPV-positive, even though HPV-positive patients had better overall outcomes than their HPV-negative peers. The patients with the best outcomes were HPV-positive non-smokers.

“It’s not clear why we’re finding these survival differences for patients who have matted nodes,” says study lead author Matthew E. Spector, M.D., a head and neck surgery resident at U-M who won a national award from the American Head and Neck Society for this work. “It is possible that there are biological and molecular differences in these types of tumors, which can be explored in future research.”

The results affirm the value of having a team of doctors and researchers from different specialties, radiology, oncology, biostatistics and surgery, working together to find advances that can directly benefit patients, Chepeha says. “This was a collaborative effort and all of the authors made important contributions,” he adds.

The study tracked 78 cancer patients who were part of a clinical trial evaluating two cancer drugs in combination with intensity-modulated radiation therapy. All the patients had stage III or IV squamous cell carcinoma of the oropharynx and had not had any previous treatment. Sixteen of the 78 patients had matted nodes.

“It’s significant that we’ve identified this new marker that can help us predict which patients have worse survival odds,” Chepeha says. “Now we need to go one step further and figure out what mechanisms are at work and how we can use this knowledge to improve survival rates.”

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As the War on Cancer enters its fifth decade and the number of people being diagnosed with cancer continues to rise, Lung Cancer Alliance (LCA) called for more aggressive integration of advanced imaging technology and biomedical research to improve prevention, earlier detection and treatment of cancer.

“We have developed remarkable new tools for imaging and biomarker identification that can bring about enormous changes at this moment in time and drive rapid improvements in the entire continuum of care in cancer,” said Laurie Fenton-Ambrose, President and CEO of Lung Cancer Alliance.

“But imaging and biomedical research must be linked together,” she said.

In 1975, when Congress passed the National Cancer Act, dubbed the War on Cancer legislation, 400 new cases of cancer were being diagnosed each year for every 100,000 people in the population. According to the latest figures, in 2008 that number rose to 463 new cases for every 100,000 people.

Over 1.6 million people will be diagnosed with cancer this year.

While the rate and number of people being diagnosed with cancer overall continues to climb, some progress has been made in reducing the percentage of people who die from cancer, primarily because of screening and better treatments. However the decline is uneven.

The drop in lung cancer death rates among men reflects the drop in the number of men smoking and being diagnosed with lung cancer, but not a reduction in the lethality of lung cancer, which continues to kill three times as many men as prostate cancer.

For women, incidence or mortality rates are still twice as high as they were in 1975 and nearly twice as many women will die of lung cancer than breast cancer.

In addition the percentage of women with lung cancer who have never smoked is twice as high as men.

“The overall numbers are staggering,” said Fenton-Ambrose.

Of the 577,000 people who will die of some form of cancer this year, one in four women and three in ten men will die of lung cancer – more than the combined total of deaths from breast, prostate, colon and pancreatic cancers.

“However, this past year has also brought us the most significant advance we have ever seen for lung cancer – the validation of CT screening as a life-saving tool that can dramatically reduce lung cancer mortality among those at high risk,” she said.

According to several national and international studies, that reduction would be at least 20% and possibly as high as 50-60%, which translates to 35,000 to 95,000 lives saved a year.

Screening can also stimulate research into precancerous conditions, genetic mutations and biomarkers that will improve risk assessment, diagnosis and treatment for all types of lung cancer, including lung cancers not associated with smoking.

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It is possibly not yet a household name, but it is probable that the voice and the face are. Natalie Imbruglia appears on television, in cinemas, in advertising and on the radio and in concert. Last year, she was a judge on the Australian ‘X-Factor’; this year might be busier. Ms. Imbruglia will be the spokesmodel for  the jewelry company, Kailis, with both supporting The Salvation Army. She is also working on her fifth album, to be released next year.

Ms. Imbruglia writes much of her own pop music. Her first album, ‘Left of the Middle’ (1997), crammed her display-cabinet with over a dozen awards, particularly for its first single, ‘Torn.’ The album sold over 2 million copies, achieving ‘Platinum’ status. Her next two albums, ‘White Lilies Island,’ and ‘Counting Down the Days,’ each brought nominations and awards as well.

Her first starring role, in 2009’s ‘Closed for Winter,’ earned her a best-actress nomination at the Asian Festival of First Films. It was not such a long time acting from her early days in TV. By seventeen, she had landed a role in the Australian television-institution, ‘Neighbours.’ This is the same series that launched a few Australians, including Kylie Minogue, another model singing-actress (or acting model-singer?).

Ms. Imbruglia left the show and pursued a recording career, but she has returned to TV several times over the years. Some shows have featured Ms. Imbruglia’s acting, but even more have presented her music. Her songs have been performed in a number of films as well.

It was her supporting role in the comedy ‘Johnny English’ (2003), starring Rowan Atkinson, that has been her greatest film exposure in North America so far. The film received mixed reviews, although it performed well. Ms. Imbruglia’s performance and charisma were among the positive reviews. Not just another pretty face.

But Ms. Imbruglia certainly has a pretty face. She was a spokesmodel for L’Oréal for five years, and has appeared on TV and in print for such companies as The Gap. That pretty face also promotes charitable causes such as cancer-research campaigns, Oxfam, PETA and Make Poverty History. She will be working with Kailis over the next two years; one of the jewelry lines was designed with Ms. Imbruglia. Part of the proceeds will benefit The Salvation Army’s Oasis Youth Support Network.

It is very likely Natalie Imbruglia will continue to increase her following in both her music and her screen careers. After problems with her record labels, her album’s release next year will be hotly anticipated, as will her next acting role. She might need to expand her display-cabinet.

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Some people have all the luck. At an early age, Milla Jovovich was acting, modelling, and writing and performing music. In each case, she received strong reviews. At any moment, she might be featured in film, fashion magazines and events, on the soundtrack to another film, and promoting a charitable cause.

Ms. Jovovich appeared as Milady de Winter in the adaptation of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ directed by her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, as well as in four other films this year, and will return in at least two films scheduled for next year.

Ms. Jovovich rules the fashion world: she co-founded a fashion line, Jovovich-Hawk; she has appeared in hundreds of magazines, TV-commercials and other fashion and cosmetics promotions; she is a spokesmodel for L’Oréal, one of the highest profiles for models. She also sponsors a number of charities, such as cancer research, AIDS research, wildlife societies, UNICEF and UNESCO.

Her only music album, ‘The Divine Comedy,’ was released in 1994, when she was 16; she had written it the year before. She had a band for a short time, called Plastic Has Memory, which never made an album but made music and has a song on the benefit CD, ‘Hollywood Goes Wild.’ Ms. Jovovich continues to produce music for screen and for anyone via her web-site, www.millaj.com.

While the music was well received, it is not as widely known as her work in the fashion and film industries. Ms. Jovovich has a rare versatility in her styles: she can dramatically change her look and still keep a distinctive presence. This has served her well around the world. Her film work has extended around the globe as well, with this year’s ‘Lucky Trouble’ coming from Russia. Ms. Jovovich is multi-lingual.

Most of her fans know her from the film franchise, ‘Resident Evil.’ The four films, and a fifth next year, are based on a popular video-game and are directed by Mr. Anderson. He is not the first of her director-husbands: she was also married to Luc Besson, who directed her in her breakthrough, ‘The Fifth Element’ (1997), as the “perfect being,” and ‘The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc’ (1999).

She has appeared in the weighty ‘Chaplin’ (1992) and the fashion-comedy ‘Zoolander’ (2001). But it is her action roles that have made the biggest mark. Her Alice in ‘Resident Evil’ (2002) helped garner a following, and four sequels have followed so far. She does many of her own stunts.

Milla Jovovich is beautiful; she can act; she can sing and write songs; she plays the guitar; she speaks several languages; she works for charities. She presents herself well in interviews, and has a fun and accessible demeanour. She is also a mother. She is more the saviour than damsel in distress, though she can exude vulnerability, and always femininity. Her daughter will be another to watch.

cinemafestival / Shutterstock.com

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