The EXcellenT Trial: Exercise in Extended Oncogene Addicted Lung Cancer in Active Treatment.

Introduction: The discovery of oncogenic mutations that drive the growth and progression of Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) led to the development of a range of molecular targeted therapies. Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) improve the overall outcome of patients with oncogene addicted NSCLC, ensure a better compliance to treatment and few side effects compared to traditional chemotherapy. However, the treatment is still completely "drug-centric", in a population of patients who usually survive for a long time and desire to regain their quality of life.

Prolonged Pemetrexed Infusion Plus Gemcitabine in Refractory Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: Preclinical Rationale and Phase II Study Results.

Lessons Learned: Difficulties in translating in vitro results into clinical practice are inevitable.Further efforts to verify the efficacy of alternative schedules of pemetrexed in solid tumors are encouraged.

Background: We investigated the cytotoxic activity of pemetrexed in combination with several drugs (gemcitabine, carboplatin, vinorelbine, and mitomycin C) using different exposure schedules in three colon cancer cell lines.

Beyond Cognition: Reading Motivation and Reading Comprehension.

The authors review research on children's reading motivation and its relation to their reading comprehension. They begin by discussing work on the development of school motivation in general and reading motivation in particular, reviewing work showing that many children's reading motivation declines over the school years. Girls tend to have more positive motivation for reading than do boys, and there are ethnic differences in children's reading motivation.

Vaccination with autologous dendritic cells loaded with autologous tumor lysate or homogenate combined with immunomodulating radiotherapy and/or preleukapheresis IFN-α in patients with metastatic melanoma: a randomised "proof-of-principle" phase II study.

Background: Vaccination with dendritic cells (DC) loaded with tumor antigens elicits tumor-specific immune responses capable of killing cancer cells without inducing meaningful side-effects. Patients with advanced melanoma enrolled onto our phase II clinical studies have been treated with autologous DC loaded with autologous tumor lysate/homogenate matured with a cytokine cocktail, showing a clinical benefit (PR + SD) in 55.5% of evaluable cases to date.

Role of conventional chemosensitivity test and tissue biomarker expression in predicting response to treatment of peritoneal carcinomatosis from colon cancer.

Unlabelled: Peritoneal carcinomatosis (PC) is observed in approximately 10% of patients with colorectal cancer at the time of primary cancer resection. Most of these patients receive 5-fluorouracil (5-FU)- or oxaliplatin-containing chemotherapy regimens as first-, second-, or third-line treatment. In the present study, sensitivity and resistance to drugs used to treat PC were better defined by a conventional chemosensitivity test than by biomarker expression.