Cancer med-withholding mom gets 8 to 10 years

(CBS/AP)

LAWRENCE, Mass. - A Massachusetts woman convicted of attempted murder for withholding cancer medications from her autistic son was sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison.

Kristen LaBrie wept and expressed remorse before a judge announced her punishment Friday in Lawrence Superior Court. She said she misses her son every day.

Authorities say LaBrie stopped filling Jeremy Fraser's cancer medication prescriptions. The boy died in 2009 at age 9. Prosecutors argued that he had an 85 to 90 percent chance of surviving had he received the proper treatment.

Mom kept meds from cancer-ridden autistic son

But LaBrie testified that the medicine made her son suffer even more.

"He was very, very sick, and I was afraid, and I did not want to have to make him get any more sick."

Judge Richard Welch said he had sympathy for the "tremendous pressures" LaBrie faced as a single parent raising a severely disabled child. But he said withholding the boy's treatment was "an extended, secretive and calculated act that chills the soul."

LaBrie could have gotten 20 years. Prosecutors asked for at least 16. Her lawyer sought one year in jail.

Her lawyer argued she was simply overwhelmed by caring for her son and asked for one year in jail plus probation

Oxford BioMedica announces analyses of TRIST study for publication

Oxford BioMedica plc a leading gene therapy company announces that further analyses of the TroVax Renal Immunotherapy Survival Trial (TRIST), a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase III study, have been accepted for publication in Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy, the official journal of the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy.

TroVax (MVA-5T4) is a therapeutic cancer vaccine designed to stimulate the immune system to destroy cancerous cells expressing the 5T4 tumour antigen which is broadly distributed throughout a wide range of solid tumours.

The phase III TRIST results, published in Clinical Cancer Research in November 2010, confirmed the association between a high 5T4 antibody response and enhanced survival in patients treated with TroVax. Using data from the TRIST study, Oxford BioMedica identified an algorithm (the “Immune Response Surrogate”; IRS) for predicting the quantitative 5T4 antibody response induced by TroVax in order to identify those patients who are most likely to mount a strong 5T4 antibody response before receiving TroVax. The IRS is a combination of three baseline (pre-treatment) blood parameters which can be measured using a blood test; 5T4 antibody levels, haemoglobin and haematocrit (the proportion of blood volume occupied by red blood cells).

When applied to the TRIST results, the IRS showed a significant correlation between the 5T4 antibody response, induced following vaccination with TroVax, and treatment benefit, i.e. patients with higher IRS values who were treated with TroVax survived longer than patients in the placebo group with the same IRS values. Importantly, the IRS was also associated with 5T4 antibody response and survival when applied to an independent dataset derived from the nine historic phase I and II studies of TroVax in patients with renal, colorectal and prostate cancer, implying that the IRS could potentially be applied to multiple cancer types.

The IRS will be used in all future TroVax clinical trials including the current phase II study in hormone refractory prostate cancer, in addition to the planned sponsored phase II studies in mesothelioma, colorectal and ovarian cancers expected to start in 2011. Based on the typical blood profiles of patients with these cancer indications, it is expected that the IRS will predict that the majority of these patient populations may benefit from TroVax.

Stuart Naylor, chief scientific officer of Oxford BioMedica, said: “Few immunotherapy treatments have demonstrated a direct link between the predicted mode of action and clinical benefit. TroVax stands apart as a cancer vaccine that elicits a strong and readily definable immune response. The IRS will allow us to target a more responsive patient population and we are confident that this novel biomarker will be further validated by results from our current Phase II clinical development programme for TroVax.”