Combination therapy treats chemotherapy resistant tumours
A new therapy that involves combining two cancer drugs simultaneously has been hailed as a major breakthrough in treating tumours resistant to chemotherapy.
A new therapy that involves combining two cancer drugs simultaneously has been hailed as a major breakthrough in treating tumours resistant to chemotherapy.
Scientists at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, have treated mice suffering from lymphoma with rapamycin, an antibiotic, and a traditional chemotherapy drug called doxorubicin. The combination reversed the tumours' resistance to chemotherapy, eliminating the cancer in all the mice.
According to Dr Hans-Guido Wendel, author of the study, which has been featured in Nature magazine, the treatment targeted tumours with a specific genetic defect that allows cancerous cells to proliferate into a tumour. While the study focused on B-cell lymphoma, which is associated with leukaemia and lymph node cancer, the same trait is common in a variety of different cancers that the team says could also be treated by the combination therapy.
The researchers were unable to discover how rapamycin made the tumours respond to the second drug. Human trials for the combination drug therapy are currently in the design stage.