NEW YORK -- A breast-feeding mother who wants extra breaks so she can pump milk during the licensing exam that she needs to secure a prestigious medical residency asked a Massachusetts judge to settle her dispute with the board that administers it.
Sophie Currier has completed a joint M.D./Ph.D. program at Harvard University while having two babies in the last two years. Her goal is a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a career in medical research.
"The one requirement is to pass this exam," she said Tuesday.
Currier, 33, requested extra break time during the nine-hour test, saying that if she does not nurse her 4-month-old daughter, Lea, or pump breast milk every two to three hours she risks medical complications.
The National Board of Medical Examiners, which administers the test, said it understands the needs of breast-feeding mothers but cannot grant extra time for pumping.
"If we are variable in the time that's allotted to trainees, we alter the performance of the examination," board spokeswoman Dr. Ruth Hoppe said.
Currier filed a petition in state Superior Court in Massachusetts asking the court to intervene and grant her the extra time during the test later this month.
A hearing had been scheduled for Wednesday in state court, but board attorney Joe Savage filed papers to have the case removed to federal court. Currier's attorney, Christine Collins, said she didn't know when the next hearing would be.
Currier, who lives Brookline, Mass., also has a 22-month-old son, Theo, and has already received special accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act for dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; she can take the nine-hour test, which is offered throughout the nation several times a year, over two days instead of one. She is seeking an extra 60-minute break each day to pump breast milk.
If she doesn't get the extra time, she said, she fears she could become engorged or develop blocked milk ducts or mastitis, a painful breast inflammation.
"I can get away with pumping about every three hours," she said.
Currier is feeling added pressure because she already took the test in April, when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and failed by a few points.
Hoppe said other nursing mothers who have taken the exam have found the 45 minutes of permitted break time sufficient.
"We've had women who either fed their infant or pumped during their break time," she said.
But Dr. Ruth Lawrence, who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics' breast-feeding section, called the medical examining board's position too rigid.
"It's a classic institutional response," said Lawrence, a professor of pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester. "You would hope that everyone in the medical profession had an appreciation for the tremendous importance of breast-feeding one's infant."
Medical authorities have long touted the benefits of breast-feeding for mother and baby. Lawrence said the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies be fed breast milk exclusively for the first six months of life and that they continue to nurse for at least six more months while other foods are added to their diets.
Some employers have made accommodations for breast-feeding mothers such as providing lactation rooms for pumping in private, but federal anti-discrimination laws do not protect nursing mothers.
The Breastfeeding Promotion Act, pending in Congress, would protect women from being fired or punished for pumping or nursing during breaks.
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
วันเสาร์ที่ 15 กันยายน พ.ศ. 2550
Early puberty in girls troubling
By Dorsey Griffith - Bee Medical Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, September 15, 2007Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
American girls are entering puberty at earlier ages, putting them at far greater risk for breast cancer later in life and for all sorts of social and emotional problems well before they reach adulthood.
Girls as young as 8 increasingly are starting to menstruate, develop breasts and grow pubic and underarm hair -- biological milestones that only decades ago typically occurred at 13 or older. African American girls are especially prone to early puberty.
Theories abound as to what is driving the trend, but the exact cause, or causes, is not known. A new report, commissioned by the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, has gathered heretofore disparate pieces of evidence to help explain the phenomenon -- and spur efforts to help prevent it.
"This is a review of what we know -- it's absolutely superb," said Dr. Marion Kavanaugh-Lynch, an oncologist and director of the California Breast Cancer Research Program in Oakland, which directs tobacco tax proceeds to research projects. "Having something like this document put together that discusses all the factors that influence puberty will advance the science and allow us to think creatively about new areas of study."
The stakes are high: "The data indicates that if you get your first period before age 12, your risk of breast cancer is 50 percent higher than if you get it at age 16," said the report's author, biologist Sandra Steingraber, herself a cancer survivor. "For every year we could delay a girl's first menstrual period, we could prevent thousands of breast cancers."
Kavanaugh-Lynch said most breast cancer cells thrive on estrogen, and girls who menstruate early are exposed to more estrogen than normally maturing girls.
Steingraber's paper, "The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know," examines everything from obesity and inactivity to family stress, sexual imagery in media sources and accidental exposures of girls to chemicals that can change the timing of sexual maturation.
Steingraber concludes that early puberty could best be understood as an "ecological disorder," resulting from a variety of environmental hits.
"The evidence suggests that children's hormonal systems are being altered by various stimuli, and that early puberty is the coincidental, non-adaptive outcome," she writes.
Steingraber's report is being released amid growing national interest in how the environment contributes to disease, particularly cancer.
California is at the forefront of the research movement. Among the ongoing efforts:
• The California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program, a five-year, state-funded project, will measure chemical exposures in blood and urine samples from more than 2,000 Californians.
• The Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center, a federally funded project run by scientists at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, is studying predictors of early puberty through monitoring of environmental exposures in more than 400 Bay Area girls over several years.
For years, parents, doctors and teachers have recognized the trend in early puberty among girls, with little information to explain it.
Dr. Charles Wibbelsman, a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on adolescents, said he now routinely sees girls as young as 8 with breast development and girls as young as 9 who have started their periods. He said the phenomenon is most striking in African American girls.
"We don't think of third-graders as using tampons or wearing bras," he said. In fact, he said, pediatricians are having to adjust the way they do regular check-ups because the older approaches don't jibe with reality.
Steingraber acknowledges that some of the shift in girls' puberty is evolutionary, a reflection of better infectious disease control and improved nutrition, conditions that allow mammals to reproduce.
But since the mid-20th century, she said, other factors seem to have "hijacked the system" that dictates the onset of puberty.
Rising childhood obesity rates clearly play a role, she said, noting that chubbier girls tend to reach puberty earlier than thinner girls. Levels of leptin, a hormone produced by body fat, is one trigger for puberty, and leptin levels are higher in blacks than in other groups.
But obesity cannot alone be blamed for the shifts, she said. Steingraber's paper explored many other factors that likely play a role, including exposure to common household chemicals. And she cited findings that link early puberty with premature birth and low birth weight, formula feeding of infants and excessive television viewing and media use.
"My job was to put together a huge jigsaw puzzle," she said.
Steingraber also reported associations of early puberty with emotional and social problems. "The world is not a good place for early maturing girls," she said. "They are at higher risk of depression, early alcohol abuse, substance abuse, early first sexual encounter and unintended pregnancies."
The reasons for this may be related to the way these children are treated or because of the way puberty affects a child's judgment, she said.
"It's possible that developing an adult-style brain at age 10 instead of 14 makes you make decisions about your life that are not really in your best interest," she said.
Priya Batra, a women's health psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, said she's seen the effects on girls who "look like sexual beings before they are ready to be sexual beings," and counseled mothers worried about their daughters entering puberty too early.
"It's a stressful culture, and we have a lot of demands on children," she said. "It's hard when we add this other layer of early puberty."
About the writer:
The Bee's Dorsey Griffith can be reached at (916) 321-1089 or dgriffith@sacbee.com.This is a review of what we know -- it's absolutely superb," said Dr. Marion Kavanaugh-Lynch, an oncologist and director of the California Breast Cancer Research Program in Oakland, which directs tobacco tax proceeds to research projects. "Having something like this document put together that discusses all the factors that influence puberty will advance the science and allow us to think creatively about new areas of study."
The stakes are high: "The data indicates that if you get your first period before age 12, your risk of breast cancer is 50 percent higher than if you get it at age 16," said the report's author, biologist Sandra Steingraber, herself a cancer survivor. "For every year we could delay a girl's first menstrual period, we could prevent thousands of breast cancers."
Kavanaugh-Lynch said most breast cancer cells thrive on estrogen, and girls who menstruate early are exposed to more estrogen than normally maturing girls.
Steingraber's paper, "The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know," examines everything from obesity and inactivity to family stress, sexual imagery in media sources and accidental exposures of girls to chemicals that can change the timing of sexual maturation.
Steingraber concludes that early puberty could best be understood as an "ecological disorder," resulting from a variety of environmental hits.
"The evidence suggests that children's hormonal systems are being altered by various stimuli, and that early puberty is the coincidental, non-adaptive outcome," she writes.
Steingraber's report is being released amid growing national interest in how the environment contributes to disease, particularly cancer.
California is at the forefront of the research movement. Among the ongoing efforts:
• The California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program, a five-year, state-funded project, will measure chemical exposures in blood and urine samples from more than 2,000 Californians.
• The Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center, a federally funded project run by scientists at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, is studying predictors of early puberty through monitoring of environmental exposures in more than 400 Bay Area girls over several years.
For years, parents, doctors and teachers have recognized the trend in early puberty among girls, with little information to explain it.
Dr. Charles Wibbelsman, a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on adolescents, said he now routinely sees girls as young as 8 with breast development and girls as young as 9 who have started their periods. He said the phenomenon is most striking in African American girls.
"We don't think of third-graders as using tampons or wearing bras," he said. In fact, he said, pediatricians are having to adjust the way they do regular check-ups because the older approaches don't jibe with reality.
Steingraber acknowledges that some of the shift in girls' puberty is evolutionary, a reflection of better infectious disease control and improved nutrition, conditions that allow mammals to reproduce.
But since the mid-20th century, she said, other factors seem to have "hijacked the system" that dictates the onset of puberty.
Rising childhood obesity rates clearly play a role, she said, noting that chubbier girls tend to reach puberty earlier than thinner girls. Levels of leptin, a hormone produced by body fat, is one trigger for puberty, and leptin levels are higher in blacks than in other groups.
But obesity cannot alone be blamed for the shifts, she said. Steingraber's paper explored many other factors that likely play a role, including exposure to common household chemicals. And she cited findings that link early puberty with premature birth and low birth weight, formula feeding of infants and excessive television viewing and media use.
"My job was to put together a huge jigsaw puzzle," she said.
Steingraber also reported associations of early puberty with emotional and social problems. "The world is not a good place for early maturing girls," she said. "They are at higher risk of depression, early alcohol abuse, substance abuse, early first sexual encounter and unintended pregnancies."
The reasons for this may be related to the way these children are treated or because of the way puberty affects a child's judgment, she said.
"It's possible that developing an adult-style brain at age 10 instead of 14 makes you make decisions about your life that are not really in your best interest," she said.
Priya Batra, a women's health psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, said she's seen the effects on girls who "look like sexual beings before they are ready to be sexual beings," and counseled mothers worried about their daughters entering puberty too early.
"It's a stressful culture, and we have a lot of demands on children," she said. "It's hard when we add this other layer of early puberty."
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, September 15, 2007Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
American girls are entering puberty at earlier ages, putting them at far greater risk for breast cancer later in life and for all sorts of social and emotional problems well before they reach adulthood.
Girls as young as 8 increasingly are starting to menstruate, develop breasts and grow pubic and underarm hair -- biological milestones that only decades ago typically occurred at 13 or older. African American girls are especially prone to early puberty.
Theories abound as to what is driving the trend, but the exact cause, or causes, is not known. A new report, commissioned by the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, has gathered heretofore disparate pieces of evidence to help explain the phenomenon -- and spur efforts to help prevent it.
"This is a review of what we know -- it's absolutely superb," said Dr. Marion Kavanaugh-Lynch, an oncologist and director of the California Breast Cancer Research Program in Oakland, which directs tobacco tax proceeds to research projects. "Having something like this document put together that discusses all the factors that influence puberty will advance the science and allow us to think creatively about new areas of study."
The stakes are high: "The data indicates that if you get your first period before age 12, your risk of breast cancer is 50 percent higher than if you get it at age 16," said the report's author, biologist Sandra Steingraber, herself a cancer survivor. "For every year we could delay a girl's first menstrual period, we could prevent thousands of breast cancers."
Kavanaugh-Lynch said most breast cancer cells thrive on estrogen, and girls who menstruate early are exposed to more estrogen than normally maturing girls.
Steingraber's paper, "The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know," examines everything from obesity and inactivity to family stress, sexual imagery in media sources and accidental exposures of girls to chemicals that can change the timing of sexual maturation.
Steingraber concludes that early puberty could best be understood as an "ecological disorder," resulting from a variety of environmental hits.
"The evidence suggests that children's hormonal systems are being altered by various stimuli, and that early puberty is the coincidental, non-adaptive outcome," she writes.
Steingraber's report is being released amid growing national interest in how the environment contributes to disease, particularly cancer.
California is at the forefront of the research movement. Among the ongoing efforts:
• The California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program, a five-year, state-funded project, will measure chemical exposures in blood and urine samples from more than 2,000 Californians.
• The Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center, a federally funded project run by scientists at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, is studying predictors of early puberty through monitoring of environmental exposures in more than 400 Bay Area girls over several years.
For years, parents, doctors and teachers have recognized the trend in early puberty among girls, with little information to explain it.
Dr. Charles Wibbelsman, a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on adolescents, said he now routinely sees girls as young as 8 with breast development and girls as young as 9 who have started their periods. He said the phenomenon is most striking in African American girls.
"We don't think of third-graders as using tampons or wearing bras," he said. In fact, he said, pediatricians are having to adjust the way they do regular check-ups because the older approaches don't jibe with reality.
Steingraber acknowledges that some of the shift in girls' puberty is evolutionary, a reflection of better infectious disease control and improved nutrition, conditions that allow mammals to reproduce.
But since the mid-20th century, she said, other factors seem to have "hijacked the system" that dictates the onset of puberty.
Rising childhood obesity rates clearly play a role, she said, noting that chubbier girls tend to reach puberty earlier than thinner girls. Levels of leptin, a hormone produced by body fat, is one trigger for puberty, and leptin levels are higher in blacks than in other groups.
But obesity cannot alone be blamed for the shifts, she said. Steingraber's paper explored many other factors that likely play a role, including exposure to common household chemicals. And she cited findings that link early puberty with premature birth and low birth weight, formula feeding of infants and excessive television viewing and media use.
"My job was to put together a huge jigsaw puzzle," she said.
Steingraber also reported associations of early puberty with emotional and social problems. "The world is not a good place for early maturing girls," she said. "They are at higher risk of depression, early alcohol abuse, substance abuse, early first sexual encounter and unintended pregnancies."
The reasons for this may be related to the way these children are treated or because of the way puberty affects a child's judgment, she said.
"It's possible that developing an adult-style brain at age 10 instead of 14 makes you make decisions about your life that are not really in your best interest," she said.
Priya Batra, a women's health psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, said she's seen the effects on girls who "look like sexual beings before they are ready to be sexual beings," and counseled mothers worried about their daughters entering puberty too early.
"It's a stressful culture, and we have a lot of demands on children," she said. "It's hard when we add this other layer of early puberty."
About the writer:
The Bee's Dorsey Griffith can be reached at (916) 321-1089 or dgriffith@sacbee.com.This is a review of what we know -- it's absolutely superb," said Dr. Marion Kavanaugh-Lynch, an oncologist and director of the California Breast Cancer Research Program in Oakland, which directs tobacco tax proceeds to research projects. "Having something like this document put together that discusses all the factors that influence puberty will advance the science and allow us to think creatively about new areas of study."
The stakes are high: "The data indicates that if you get your first period before age 12, your risk of breast cancer is 50 percent higher than if you get it at age 16," said the report's author, biologist Sandra Steingraber, herself a cancer survivor. "For every year we could delay a girl's first menstrual period, we could prevent thousands of breast cancers."
Kavanaugh-Lynch said most breast cancer cells thrive on estrogen, and girls who menstruate early are exposed to more estrogen than normally maturing girls.
Steingraber's paper, "The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know," examines everything from obesity and inactivity to family stress, sexual imagery in media sources and accidental exposures of girls to chemicals that can change the timing of sexual maturation.
Steingraber concludes that early puberty could best be understood as an "ecological disorder," resulting from a variety of environmental hits.
"The evidence suggests that children's hormonal systems are being altered by various stimuli, and that early puberty is the coincidental, non-adaptive outcome," she writes.
Steingraber's report is being released amid growing national interest in how the environment contributes to disease, particularly cancer.
California is at the forefront of the research movement. Among the ongoing efforts:
• The California Environmental Contaminant Biomonitoring Program, a five-year, state-funded project, will measure chemical exposures in blood and urine samples from more than 2,000 Californians.
• The Bay Area Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center, a federally funded project run by scientists at Kaiser Permanente and the University of California, San Francisco, is studying predictors of early puberty through monitoring of environmental exposures in more than 400 Bay Area girls over several years.
For years, parents, doctors and teachers have recognized the trend in early puberty among girls, with little information to explain it.
Dr. Charles Wibbelsman, a pediatrician with Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on adolescents, said he now routinely sees girls as young as 8 with breast development and girls as young as 9 who have started their periods. He said the phenomenon is most striking in African American girls.
"We don't think of third-graders as using tampons or wearing bras," he said. In fact, he said, pediatricians are having to adjust the way they do regular check-ups because the older approaches don't jibe with reality.
Steingraber acknowledges that some of the shift in girls' puberty is evolutionary, a reflection of better infectious disease control and improved nutrition, conditions that allow mammals to reproduce.
But since the mid-20th century, she said, other factors seem to have "hijacked the system" that dictates the onset of puberty.
Rising childhood obesity rates clearly play a role, she said, noting that chubbier girls tend to reach puberty earlier than thinner girls. Levels of leptin, a hormone produced by body fat, is one trigger for puberty, and leptin levels are higher in blacks than in other groups.
But obesity cannot alone be blamed for the shifts, she said. Steingraber's paper explored many other factors that likely play a role, including exposure to common household chemicals. And she cited findings that link early puberty with premature birth and low birth weight, formula feeding of infants and excessive television viewing and media use.
"My job was to put together a huge jigsaw puzzle," she said.
Steingraber also reported associations of early puberty with emotional and social problems. "The world is not a good place for early maturing girls," she said. "They are at higher risk of depression, early alcohol abuse, substance abuse, early first sexual encounter and unintended pregnancies."
The reasons for this may be related to the way these children are treated or because of the way puberty affects a child's judgment, she said.
"It's possible that developing an adult-style brain at age 10 instead of 14 makes you make decisions about your life that are not really in your best interest," she said.
Priya Batra, a women's health psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, said she's seen the effects on girls who "look like sexual beings before they are ready to be sexual beings," and counseled mothers worried about their daughters entering puberty too early.
"It's a stressful culture, and we have a lot of demands on children," she said. "It's hard when we add this other layer of early puberty."
Immunicon Congratulates Dr. Daniel Hayes on Winning ASCO's Inaugural Gianni Bonadonna Breast Cancer Award
Philadelphia -
PHILADELPHIA -- Immunicon Corporation (NASDAQ-GM:IMMC) congratulates Daniel F. Hayes, MD, professor of internal medicine and Clinical Director of the Breast Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, for receiving the inaugural American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and The ASCO Foundation's Gianni Bonadonna Breast Cancer Award and Fellowship. The annual $10,000 award, presented at the September 7-8 Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco, recognizes an active clinical or translational researcher with a distinguished record of accomplishments in advancing the field of breast cancer.
Among his many research accomplishments, Dr. Hayes has been a major force in the clinical application of the CellSearch™ Circulating Tumor Cell Test, developed by Immunicon Corporation and marketed by Veridex LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company. In 2004, his research was among those published in The New England Journal of Medicine that had a direct impact on CellSearch's FDA Clearance. Dr. Hayes continues to conduct clinical trials and research to discover how best to integrate the knowledge gained from leveraging circulating tumor cells in the treatment of patients with metastatic breast cancer.
Byron D. Hewett, President and Chief Executive Officer of Immunicon commented, “Dr. Hayes has been a pioneering force in circulating tumor cell research. His leadership in clinical trials is helping to translate this important technology to the clinical setting.”
The Gianni Bonadonna Award is accompanied by a one-year, $50,000 Fellowship Grant that will be awarded by The ASCO Foundation to an early-career breast cancer researcher who will work in the lab at the recipient's institution. ASCO is the world's leading professional organization representing physicians of all oncology subspecialties who care for people with cancer. For more about the award, visit www.asco.org.
About Immunicon Corporation Immunicon Corporation is developing and commercializing proprietary cell- and molecular-based human diagnostic and life science research products with an initial focus on cancer disease management. Immunicon has developed platform technologies for selection and analysis of rare cells in blood, such as circulating tumor cells and circulating endothelial cells that are important in many diseases and biological processes. Immunicon’s products and underlying technology platforms also have application in the clinical development of cancer drugs and in cancer research and may have applications in other fields of medicine, such as cardiovascular and infectious diseases. For more information, please visit www.immunicon.com.
Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are often preceded by words such as “hope,” “may,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “plan,” “expect,” “intend,” “assume,” “will” and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, among others, statements regarding the anticipated clinical utility of Immunicon’s products and services and other statements not of historical fact. Immunicon cautions investors not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release, are based on the current expectations and intent of the management of Immunicon and involve certain factors, such as risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be far different from those suggested by these statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict, including, but not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: Immunicon’s dependence on Veridex, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company, in the field of cancer cell analysis; the ability to earn license and milestone payments under Immunicon’s agreement with Veridex; Immunicon’s capital and financing needs; research and development and clinical trial expenditures; commercialization of product candidates; Immunicon’s ability to obtain licenses from third parties to commercialize products; Immunicon’s ability to manage its growth; obtaining necessary regulatory approvals; reliance on third party manufacturers and suppliers; reimbursement by third party payors to Immunicon’s customers; compliance with applicable manufacturing standards; retaining key personnel; delays in the development of new products or planned improvements to products; effectiveness of products compared to competitors’ products; protection of Immunicon’s intellectual property; conflicts with third party intellectual property; product liability lawsuits that may be brought against Immunicon; labor, contract or technical difficulties; and competitive pressures in Immunicon’s industry. These factors are discussed in more detail in Immunicon’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Immunicon accepts no responsibility for updating the information contained in this press release beyond the published date, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, or for modifications made to this document by Internet or wire services. “Immunicon” and the Immunicon Corporation logo are registered trademarks of Immunicon Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Posted on:Wednesday, September 12, 2007 03:09 AM
PHILADELPHIA -- Immunicon Corporation (NASDAQ-GM:IMMC) congratulates Daniel F. Hayes, MD, professor of internal medicine and Clinical Director of the Breast Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, for receiving the inaugural American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and The ASCO Foundation's Gianni Bonadonna Breast Cancer Award and Fellowship. The annual $10,000 award, presented at the September 7-8 Breast Cancer Symposium in San Francisco, recognizes an active clinical or translational researcher with a distinguished record of accomplishments in advancing the field of breast cancer.
Among his many research accomplishments, Dr. Hayes has been a major force in the clinical application of the CellSearch™ Circulating Tumor Cell Test, developed by Immunicon Corporation and marketed by Veridex LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company. In 2004, his research was among those published in The New England Journal of Medicine that had a direct impact on CellSearch's FDA Clearance. Dr. Hayes continues to conduct clinical trials and research to discover how best to integrate the knowledge gained from leveraging circulating tumor cells in the treatment of patients with metastatic breast cancer.
Byron D. Hewett, President and Chief Executive Officer of Immunicon commented, “Dr. Hayes has been a pioneering force in circulating tumor cell research. His leadership in clinical trials is helping to translate this important technology to the clinical setting.”
The Gianni Bonadonna Award is accompanied by a one-year, $50,000 Fellowship Grant that will be awarded by The ASCO Foundation to an early-career breast cancer researcher who will work in the lab at the recipient's institution. ASCO is the world's leading professional organization representing physicians of all oncology subspecialties who care for people with cancer. For more about the award, visit www.asco.org.
About Immunicon Corporation Immunicon Corporation is developing and commercializing proprietary cell- and molecular-based human diagnostic and life science research products with an initial focus on cancer disease management. Immunicon has developed platform technologies for selection and analysis of rare cells in blood, such as circulating tumor cells and circulating endothelial cells that are important in many diseases and biological processes. Immunicon’s products and underlying technology platforms also have application in the clinical development of cancer drugs and in cancer research and may have applications in other fields of medicine, such as cardiovascular and infectious diseases. For more information, please visit www.immunicon.com.
Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are often preceded by words such as “hope,” “may,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “plan,” “expect,” “intend,” “assume,” “will” and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, among others, statements regarding the anticipated clinical utility of Immunicon’s products and services and other statements not of historical fact. Immunicon cautions investors not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release, are based on the current expectations and intent of the management of Immunicon and involve certain factors, such as risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be far different from those suggested by these statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict, including, but not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: Immunicon’s dependence on Veridex, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company, in the field of cancer cell analysis; the ability to earn license and milestone payments under Immunicon’s agreement with Veridex; Immunicon’s capital and financing needs; research and development and clinical trial expenditures; commercialization of product candidates; Immunicon’s ability to obtain licenses from third parties to commercialize products; Immunicon’s ability to manage its growth; obtaining necessary regulatory approvals; reliance on third party manufacturers and suppliers; reimbursement by third party payors to Immunicon’s customers; compliance with applicable manufacturing standards; retaining key personnel; delays in the development of new products or planned improvements to products; effectiveness of products compared to competitors’ products; protection of Immunicon’s intellectual property; conflicts with third party intellectual property; product liability lawsuits that may be brought against Immunicon; labor, contract or technical difficulties; and competitive pressures in Immunicon’s industry. These factors are discussed in more detail in Immunicon’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Immunicon accepts no responsibility for updating the information contained in this press release beyond the published date, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, or for modifications made to this document by Internet or wire services. “Immunicon” and the Immunicon Corporation logo are registered trademarks of Immunicon Corporation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Posted on:Wednesday, September 12, 2007 03:09 AM
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