By directly screening patient cancer
cells, researchers have created a new way to identify potential
treatments to effectively attack drug-resistant tumors.
While the screening system has only been used on tumor
cells in a dish and in mice, the method could someday lead to
individualized drug treatment strategies that adapt even as a
patient’s tumor changes.
“The results have been promising enough where we are
looking to see if we can develop this now to direct patient
treatments,” said Jeffrey Engelman, a medical oncologist at
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and co-senior author of
the study released online today by the journal Science.
Targeted therapies are drugs that interfere with specific
cancer-promoting pathways in tumor cells. They have been more
effective than traditional chemotherapy drugs against tumors,
though the effect usually lasts only one to two years. Tumors
rapidly mutate to use alternate pathways, like back alleys, to
bypass the original pathways blocked by the medicines.
To combat that resistance, researchers typically analyze
DNA from a biopsy of a drug-resistant tumor to try and identify
the resistance-causing mutation, then pick a new drug to block
that alternate pathway as well. This approach has met with
limited success because most genetic results are ambiguous or
don’t directly point to treatment strategies, Engelman said.
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