Researchers Find Drug That Reverses Resistance to Chemotherapy in Pancreatic Cancer
Researchers have shown that inhibiting TAK-1, an enzyme which is activated by a regulatory protein called Transforming Growth Factor beta (TGFbeta) in pancreatic cancer, could make pancreatic cancer cells more sensitive to chemotherapy possibly leading to a new drug for treatment. According to Dr. Davide Melisi of the National Cancer Institute in Italy, "Pancreatic cancer is an incurable malignancy, resistant to every anti-cancer treatment. Targeting TAK-1 could be a strategy to revert this resistance, increasing the the efficacy of chemotherapy."
To test this new discovery, Dr. Melisi along with his colleagues developed a drug that inhibited TAK-1 and tested the activity of the TAK-1 inhibitor on its own and combined it with 3 other anti-cancer drugs on mice. When combined with anti-cancer drugs, doses up to 70 times lower than with the anti-cancer drugs by themselves were used to target the same number of cancer cells and had a profound effect such as reducing the tumour volume, extending mice survival, and lowering the toxicity levels. In this study, the median average survival for the control, gemcitabine (common anti-cancer drug) on its own, TAK-1 inhibitor, and the combination of the TAK-1 and gemcitabine yielded 68, 82,87, 122 days respectively.
I found this article very interesting and exciting because this could lead to the breakthrough that scientists have been looking for for a long time because once pancreatic cancer has mestastized, it is very difficult to treat and the survival rate is low. Knowing that scientists have located and could possibly target TAK-1 in making chemotherapy more effective just shows how far the medical and scientific world has come and that we are at the very edge of a cure to this cancer. Being an RHEN major, this article gives more of an insight of the advances towards the treatment as well as another solution to cure pancreatic cancer.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/165293.php
To test this new discovery, Dr. Melisi along with his colleagues developed a drug that inhibited TAK-1 and tested the activity of the TAK-1 inhibitor on its own and combined it with 3 other anti-cancer drugs on mice. When combined with anti-cancer drugs, doses up to 70 times lower than with the anti-cancer drugs by themselves were used to target the same number of cancer cells and had a profound effect such as reducing the tumour volume, extending mice survival, and lowering the toxicity levels. In this study, the median average survival for the control, gemcitabine (common anti-cancer drug) on its own, TAK-1 inhibitor, and the combination of the TAK-1 and gemcitabine yielded 68, 82,87, 122 days respectively.
I found this article very interesting and exciting because this could lead to the breakthrough that scientists have been looking for for a long time because once pancreatic cancer has mestastized, it is very difficult to treat and the survival rate is low. Knowing that scientists have located and could possibly target TAK-1 in making chemotherapy more effective just shows how far the medical and scientific world has come and that we are at the very edge of a cure to this cancer. Being an RHEN major, this article gives more of an insight of the advances towards the treatment as well as another solution to cure pancreatic cancer.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/165293.php
Labels: pancreatic cancer, radiology
posted by Michelle Okezie at 3:07 PM
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