kidney drug helps hold off ovarian cancer relapse

Women with ovarian cancer might be able to stave off relapses for an extra five months or so by taking a drug already approved to treat kidney cancer, researchers reported Saturday.

The study was one of many being presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Another study shows that a drug might have some effect against a rare but notoriously hard to treat form of melanoma.

Ovarian cancer is often successfully controlled initially by surgery and chemotherapy. But about 70 percent of women with advanced ovarian cancer experience a relapse, often in the first year.

The study tested the strategy known as maintenance therapy. Instead of stopping treatment after the tumor is controlled and resuming it only when the cancer starts to worsen, a new drug is given immediately after the successful chemotherapy. In this study, which involved 940 women with advanced cancer, the maintenance drug was pazopanib, sold as Votrient to treat kidney cancer and soft tissue sarcoma.

For those who got the drug, the median time before the cancer worsened was 17.9 months, compared with 12.3 months for those who got a placebo as the maintenance therapy. "Many patients will experience longer disease-free and chemotherapy-free periods," said the lead author, Dr. Andreas du Bois, a gynecologic oncologist at the Kliniken Essen Mitte in Essen, Germany.

The trial was sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, which sells Votrient.

Another study found that an experimental drug, selumetinib, might be the first to improve the outcome of patients with melanoma that arises in the eye rather than the skin. So called uveal melanoma is very rare. But it has been very difficult to treat after it spreads. The drug, which is not yet on the market, is being developed by AstraZeneca under license from Array BioPharma.

new tools track emerging diseases

A new flu, H7N9, has killed 36 people since it was first found in China two months ago. A new virus from the SARS family has killed 22 people since it was found on the ­Arabian Peninsula last summer.

Some aspects of the new viruses are scary. The Arabian coronavirus — now officially named MERS, for Middle East respiratory syndrome — has killed about half of those it infects, while SARS killed less than a quarter; in the lab, it replicates faster than SARS, penetrates lung cells more readily and inhibits the formation of proteins that warn the body that it is under attack.

Scientists say the world cannot afford to relax. New diseases are emerging faster than ever. Still, better surveillance means that such threats are being caught sooner, giving time to develop countermeasures. "We've done a great job globally in the last 10 years," said Dr. William B. Karesh, a wildlife veterinarian and chief of health policy for the EcoHealth Alliance, which tracks animal-human outbreaks.

Study: Americans pay more for medical costs

Whether directly from their wallets or through insurance policies, Americans pay more for almost every interaction with the medical system than other developed countries.

They are typically prescribed more expensive procedures and tests than people in other countries, no matter if those nations operate a private or national health system. A list of drug, scan and procedure prices compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans, a global network of health insurers, found that the United States came out the most costly in all 21 categories — and often by a huge margin.

Americans pay, on average, about four times as much for a hip replacement as patients in Switzerland or France and more than three times as much for a Caesarean section as those in New Zealand or Britain. The average price for Nasonex, a common nasal spray for allergies, is $108 in the United States compared with $21 in Spain. The costs of hospital stays here are about triple those in other developed countries, even though they last no longer, said a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that studies health policy.

While the United States medical system is famous for drugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and heroic care at the end of life, it turns out that a more significant factor in the nation's $2.7 trillion annual health care bill may not be the use of extraordinary services, but the high price tag of ordinary ones. "The U.S. just pays providers of health care much more for everything," said Tom Sackville, chief executive of the health plans federation and a former British health minister.

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid.

new york times