New smoking bans to be introduced in the state of Victoria, Australia will be a blow to many smokers as they mean it will be illegal to smoke in cars carrying children and on public school grounds. The advertising of cigarettes and smoking cigarette at ‘point-of-sale’, will also be banned by the Victorian Government and
Full Post: Victorian anti-smoking groups score another hit with new bans
Prozac is regularly prescribed to ease the emotional pain of patients who are being treated for cancer.
But can this common anti-depressant help to fight cancer itself?
Dr. Dan Peer of the Department of Cell Research and Immunology at Tel Aviv University is proving that it can. A study he and his colleagues recently completed validates that Prozac (chemical name fluoxetine) dramatically enhances the effectiveness of a widely used anti-cancer drug.
“The good news is that the medical community won’t have to wait - Prozac can be used for this purpose right away,” says Dr. Peer, noting that doctors in the U.S. already prescribe it to treat depression in chemotherapy patients.
Fighting Drug Resistance in Colon Cancer Patients
“Prozac is a very interesting non-specific blocker of cancer resistance,” says Dr. Peer, whose study focused on colon cancer and the anti-cancer drug doxorubicin.
In their laboratory experiments, the Tel Aviv University scientists led by graduate student Mirit Argov together with Prof. Rimona Margalit, found that Prozac enhanced doxorubicin’s efficacy more than 1,000%. Prozac, in effect, worked to block the cancer drug from leaving the interior of the cancer cell and poisoning the healthy non-cancerous cells that surrounded it.
In animal models, a mild doxorubicin-fluoxetine treatment combination slowed down tumor progression significantly. These results suggest that pairing Prozac with chemotherapeutic drugs to curb drug resistance warrants further clinical study, says Dr. Peer. His research was just published in Cancer Letters , and his suggestions are now listed as recommendations in the latest version of Cancer Encyclopedia.
Working Backward to Make Great Advances
“Working with a major drug developer, we have validated Prozac’s potential, and now Tel Aviv University can lead a humanitarian effort to save lives around the globe,” he says.
Since it is very hard to protect this patent since any clinician can prescribe Prozac, it is impossible for Tel Aviv University to commercialize its research, says Dr. Peer. Instead, he suggests that researchers join forces internationally to implement retrospective studies of all the types of cancer treatment in which Prozac was prescribed. And further clinical experiments to validate the use of Prozac with chemotherapy is also needed, he stresses.
“The next step is to take the files of chemo patients and determine whether they received Prozac for their depression,” says Dr. Peer. “This will streamline the understanding in the scientific community of whether, how and for which cancer-fighting drugs Prozac can be an effective partner. It will also give us invaluable information on how to design new drugs.”
Dr. Peer’s Tel Aviv University lab is also developing several new drug delivery nanotechnologies to bring novel therapeutics into breast, blood, pancreatic and brain cancers. A recent technological breakthrough to reprogram immune cells involved in ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease was reported in Science earlier this year and it is the basis of a new platform technology developed in his group.
http://www.aftau.org/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Tamoxifen is an effective drug used for the treatment of certain kinds of breast cancer. The doctors also prescribe the drug for women who are at a higher risk for breast cancer. The drug can be taken in empty stomach and also with food. The drug will have its effect only if it is regularly
Full Post: Tamoxifen is an effective drug used for the treatment of certain kinds of breast cance
Researchers in the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy have developed a model for predicting risk of recurrence in early stage colon cancer patients, and have used the model to also predict sensitivity to chemotherapy and targeted therapy regimens. “These findings have important implications for individualizing therapy,” said Katherine Garman, M.D., a gastroenterology fellow
Full Post: New model predicts risk of recurrence in early stage colon cancer patients
Biothera has announced today it began dosing patients in the second arm of its metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) trial in August. This arm of the trial is evaluating the combination therapy of its lead drug candidate, Imprime PGG, with Erbitux, an anti-cancer monoclonal antibody from ImClone Systems. Unlike the first trial arm, the second treatment
Full Post: Biothera initiates second phase of metastatic colorectal cancer trial
Researchers from the University of Granada and the University of Barcelona have shown that treatment with maslinic acid, a triterpenoid compound isolated from olive-skin pomace, results in a significant inhibition of cell proliferation and causes apoptotic death in colon-cancer cells. Maslinic acid is a novel natural compound and it is able to induce apoptosis
Full Post: Compound from olive-skin pomace protects against colon-cancer
A new era of intelligent cancer drug development has spurred a leap in the proportion of drugs reaching patients, according to a study by Cancer Research UK scientists published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. Scientists obtained data on 974 cancer drugs in clinical development, and calculated that there was a probability that 18 per cent
Full Post: ‘Intelligent’ cancer drug development boosts success rates --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
