Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on October 9, 2007
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2007 99(20):1505-1509; doi:10.1093/jnci/djm194
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© Oxford University Press 2007.
NEWS |
Combining Carefully Selected Drug, Patient Genetics May Lead to Total Tumor Death
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Drug combinations carefully designed to maximize the agents' effects are nothing new in cancer care. But researchers developing a new targeted therapy are taking the approach one step farther. Instead of combining it with another drug, they are following geneticists and relying on existing mutations in the cancer cells to give the drug its extra power.
They are using a small-molecule inhibitor that blocks one type of DNA repair to fight tumors that already have mutations in another DNA repair pathway. Although neither the drug nor the mutation alone is enough to kill tumor cells, inhibiting two DNA repair systems appears to be lethal. With early clinical data hinting that the approach will work, a select group of international researchers are testing the idea in ovarian and breast cancer patients who carry mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene. Many companies
Trials for BRCA-Deficient Tumors
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  A. Ashworth A Synthetic Lethal Therapeutic Approach: Poly(ADP) Ribose Polymerase Inhibitors for the Treatment of Cancers Deficient in DNA Double-Strand Break Repair J. Clin. Oncol., August 1, 2008; 26(22): 3785 - 3790. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|