Twenty-Five Department of Surgery Faculty Named to U.S. News “Top Doctors” List
U.S. News - March 01, 2012
In its most recent survey, U.S. News in collaboration
with Castle Connolly Medical Ltd. listed twenty-five (25)
surgeons in the UCSF Department of Surgery, nearly
one-third (1/3) of the clinical faculty, on the list of U.S. News
"Top Doctors". The list, compiled from the opinion of
colleagues, denotes the top 10% of physicians
within a region practicing a given
specialty. Fifteen of the 25 department
surgeons were also named by their peers to the list
of America's Top Doctors (ATD), a
distinction reserved for the top 1% of physicians
in the nation for that specialty.
The listings are published online at U.S. News. The group
rankings are intended to guide patients in selecting a
doctor and physicians in making specialty referrals.
Rise in Deadly Skin Cancers Among Young Women is Linked to Wealth
UCSF News Office - May 10, 2011
"Sun tanning, apparently - at least among well-off young white
women. In the United States, more than 90 percent of the most
deadly skin cancers - malignant melanomas - occur in the white
population. Among young women the incidence is rising most rapidly.
The risk of melanoma already has more than doubled among girls and
women ages 15 to 39 over the past three decades. Now a study led by
researchers at UCSF and the Cancer Prevention Institute of
California concludes that young women are at highest risk for
malignant melanoma if they live in neighborhoods that are both more
well-to-do and sunnier. But the researchers also found that
melanoma incidence increased at all rungs of the socioeconomic
ladder."
Yervoy, a Novel Cancer Drug, Approved for Melanoma
NY Times - March 25, 2011
"The first drug shown to prolong the lives of people with the
skin cancer melanoma won approval from the Food and Drug
Administration on Friday. The drug, Yervoy, was developed by
Bristol-Myers Squibb and is a novel type of cancer drug that works
by unleashing the body's own immune system to fight
tumors........"This is really the first time in the melanoma field
that there is a drug that extended survival in a meaningful way,"
said Dr. Gerald P. Linette, an assistant professor of medicine at
Washington University in St. Louis, who participated in a clinical
trial of the drug."
Roche B-RAF Inhibitor Prolongs Life in Advanced Melanoma Patients
New York Times - January 19, 2011
"About half of the 68,000 Americans who develop melanoma every
year have a mutation in a gene, called B-RAF, that goes awry, for
reasons not well understood, signaling cells to grow
uncontrollably. The Roche drug works by blocking a malfunctioning
protein the gene produces in cancer cells, but leaving the
functioning proteins in noncancerous cells alone.,,,,,,,,In the
drug's earliest trial, nearly every patient whose tumor cells
contained the B-RAF mutation responded to the drug. That marked a
radical difference from standard chemotherapies, whose reason for
working in certain patients and not others is not well
understood.....The company, Roche, has opened an "expanded
access" program at three cancer centers to provide the drug for
melanoma patients who are not enrolled on the trial."
"For the melanoma patients who signed on to try a drug known as
PLX4032, the clinical trial was a last resort. Their bodies were
riddled with tumors, leaving them almost certainly just months to
live. But a few weeks after taking their first dose, nearly all of
them began to recover..........new kind of cancer therapy, it was
tailored to a particular genetic mutation that was driving the
disease, and after six years of disappointments his faith in the
promise of such a "targeted" approach finally seemed borne out. His
collaborators at five other major cancer centers, melanoma
clinicians who had tested dozens of potential therapies for their
patients with no success, were equally elated."
"In a large study of previously diagnosed cases, the new
technique distinguished between benign, mole-like skin lesions and
melanomas with a success rate higher than 90 percent. It also
succeeded with most of the previously misdiagnosed cases, which
were among the most difficult to distinguish. This is the first
large-scale study to demonstrate both the high diagnostic accuracy
and practicality of a multi-biomarker approach to melanoma
diagnosis, said Mohammed Kashani-Sabet, MD, (formerly
a professor of dermatology and director of the Melanoma
Center at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
and now at California Pacific Medical Center CPMC)."
Better Understanding of Melanoma and UV Risk by UCSF Cancer Experts Confirms Danger of Sun Exposure
UCSF News Office - May 02, 2006
"Researchers can more easily set their sights on targets for new
treatments for the deadliest skin cancer, thanks to landmark
findings by UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center member Boris Bastian,
MD, PhD, and colleagues.The skin pathologist and his colleagues
showed that the skin cancer known as melanoma comes in at least
four distinct varieties. The different types may require different
targeted therapeutic approaches, the researchers found. Bastian and
colleagues classified melanomas in a new way. The classification
was based on body sites where cancers arose and on degree of sun
exposure. The researchers discovered marked differences in the way
genes were altered among the types. Different biochemical pathways
tend to be disrupted in the different types of tumors
identified."
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