Golf Event Raises Funds for Research
The 11th annual 2013 Seena Magowitz Golf & Spa Weekend is poised to help support continuing advances in treating pancreatic cancer. The event will help the foundation raise as much as $500,000 the weekend of Dec. 6-8 to benefit research at the Translational Genomics Research Institute.
In the coming year, TGen’s Physician-In-Chief Dr. Daniel Von Hoff has made it a priority to identify a way to detect pancreatic cancer in its early stages. Because there is no method of early diagnosis, patients are often in the late stages of this aggressive disease by the time it is discovered.
Von Hoff said that — with the help of the Seena Magowitz Foundation — there were considerable advances made in the past year in the treatment of pancreatic cancer, including:
· TGen’s continuing discoveries about the mechanisms of pancreatic cancer through the work of its Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) Pancreatic Cancer Dream Team.
· TGen’s new clinical trial, begun in September, on a drug derived from a plant known as “Thunder God vine,” a root used in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 2,000 years. Preclinical studies showed that a pharmaceutical version of the active ingredient in Thunder God proved effective against pancreatic cancer cells.
· And most importantly, on Sept. 6 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of nab-paclitaxel (also known as Abraxane) in combination with gemcitabine as a front-line therapy for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. In clinical trials supervised by TGen, this drug combination produced a 127 percent increase in average survival, a 59 percent increase in patients surviving at least 1 year, and a 222 percent increase in patients surviving at least 2 years.
The nab-paclitaxel/Abraxane clinical trials were funded, in part, by the Seena Magowitz Foundation.
