Chemotherapy drugs designed to kill tumors may actually encourage ovarian cancer by stimulating the growth of cells that give rise to the malignancy, a new study finds.
Not exact matches
One of those licenses went to Michael Hackett, a UNC doctoral student who got an idea 2 years ago for a potential commercial
drug: to trick tumors into absorbing
chemotherapy drugs by
designing a molecular Trojan horse.
But first, Stegh and colleagues want to hone the particle
design and to investigate treatments that combine miR - 182 with established
chemotherapy drugs in mouse models.
Chemotherapy drugs are often
designed to kill off malignant cells by damaging their DNA until they transition to a programmed death mode called apoptosis.
These new nanoparticles are equipped with specially
designed nanovalves that can control release of anticancer
drugs from thousands of pores, or tiny tubes, which hold molecules of
chemotherapy drugs within them.
Certain existing
chemotherapy drugs are
designed to induce apoptosis, rather than «septic» cell death which is called necrosis, for this reason.
Professor Michael Lisanti, who
designed the study, explained: «We now know that a proportion of cancer cells escape
chemotherapy and develop
drug resistance; we established this new strategy to find out how they do it.
At the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and
Chemotherapy in Chicago, Illinois, this weekend, researchers reported preliminary results from tests of a novel treatment in 15 HIV - infected people
designed to free them from the need to take antiretroviral
drugs.
Since stem cells are also critical for regeneration in the intestine, therapies that target these pathways may further help to
design new
drugs that reduce side effects associated with
chemotherapy, radiotherapy or other causes of intestinal damage.
The structure of these transporters is essential to the rational
design of agents which control their function.30 - 32 In our current work we investigated the
chemotherapy agent cisplatin since it the most used
chemotherapy drug for a number of cancer types and the application would have an impact on several cancers.
The
drugs used in
chemotherapy are
designed to be toxic to cancer cells usually by inhibiting cell division or causing cell suicide (apoptosis).
Chemotherapy involves the use of
drugs that are
designed to be damaging to cancer cells but unfortunately, they typically have some toxicity for healthy cells as well.
«In the last couple of years, there are actually
chemotherapy drugs that are
designed just for dogs,» Dr. Biller shares.
Chemotherapy involves the use of
drugs that are
designed to damage cancer cells.
Chemotherapy Chemotherapy is simply the administration of
drugs designed to kill cancer cells, but such therapy often affects normal cells as well.