He took human breast tumor cells, implanted them in mice and waited for metastases to occur.
The authors, from the University of California, San Francisco, noted that even when DCIS becomes an invasive cancer, it's treatable when found at an early stage: The odds that a 60-year old woman with a 7 millimeter breast tumor, would die from it in the next 10 years are less than 3%, half the risk she faces of dying from another cause during that time.
In stage IIIB breast cancer, a tumor of any size has spread to tissues near the breast the skin and chest muscles and may have spread to lymph nodes within the breast or under the arm.
Its sales are modest right now, but Novartis hopes to make it into a billion-dollar best seller by getting it approved in numerous other tumor types, including breast cancer, stomach cancer, lymphoma and certain rare types of pancreatic tumors.
In an unusual move, it plans to test Afinitor simultaneously on five other tumor types, including stomach, breast and neuroendocrine tumors (the type Apple's Steve Jobs has suffered from).
Sparc has long been implicated by researchers in the spread of colon cancer to the liver and may be similarly predictive in melanoma, breast cancer and glioblastoma, a type of brain tumor.
FORBES: Patrick Soon-Shiong and one of cancer's biggest riddles.
Using tumor samples from wo-men with breast cancer, he used a gadget called a cell sorter to sift through dozens of different proteins on the surface of breast cancer cells, searching for patterns that might identify stem cells.
In another study of RAD in breast cancer, three out of of 22 patients had big tumor shrinkage, while the disease stabilized in another 13 for prolonged periods.
One theory, which may explain its failure against breast cancer, is that there may be tissue-specific proteins that spur tumor growth in the absence of VEGF.
Later studies showed that when breast cancer recurs, it comes back about 90% of the time close to where the original tumor was.
The presence of these rare "circulating tumor cells" may indicate that a patient's cancer is metastasizing, spreading from the breast, say, to the lungs.
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