Like all animal tissues, cancerous tumors need blood to survive, and one of the hottest areas of research cancer is to find ways to block the blood supply. Now scientists have created a new treatment that destroys blood vessels supplying tumors in mice while leaving others unscathed blood vessels. Scientists say the findings could eventually lead to new therapies against cancer in humans.
Cancer researchers have high hopes when scientists reported in 1997 that two new drugs, angiostatin and endostatin, prevented the growth of blood vessels and dramatically reduced in tumors mouse. Many of these so-called anti-angiogenesis drugs are in clinical trials, and early results look promising. But these drugs all have one major drawback: Although they stop or slow tumor growth, they do not destroy existing blood vessels of the tumor. This should be possible because the inner walls of tumor vessels are covered with a protein called tissue factor (TF) not present in normal blood vessels.
biochemists from the University Yale Zhiwei Hu and Alan Garen exploited this difference to create a new drug that seeks blood vessels of the tumor and destroys them. The drug, known as Icon is a unique compound consisting of two parts, which recognizes the blood vessels coated with TF and another that causes the immune system to attack them. The researchers speculated that these two components together should attack the tumor vessels without harming normal ones. To test icon, they injected a virus genetically designed to produce seven mice with cancer of the human prostate.
In the early edition of the October 2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , they report that tumors in mice decreased steadily for about 0 days with only a small sliver remaining at the end of the experiment. In contrast, tumors in the seven control mice grew rapidly and they died within 63 days. The treatment was effective against human melanoma tumors in mice as well, and scientists believe it may struggle against a range of cancers.
Harvard biologist Cancer Judah Folkman, who studies the anti-angiogenesis drugs, said "the novel researchers and elegant approach" may lead to new therapies that can be tested for human cancers. "This is a very important document," says Folkman.
Related Sites
homepage Alan Garen
Angiogenesis Foundation
0 Komentar