Scientists have identified a potential drug that may be able to hit a variety of cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed. If it works in human trials already underway, the drug would be a significant advance over current chemotherapy agents and may one day help patients who do not respond to other medicines.
flavopiridol, like many other drugs, works by blocking proteins essential to cell division. It has been in clinical trials for kidney, prostate, colon and other cancers since 1998. Last year, a new talent came to light: flavopiridol also blocks a protein that helps transcribe DNA messenger RNA (mRNA), the first step in producing a protein from a gene and a process that all cells need to stay alive. researcher Louis Staudt cancer of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues was curious about the effects of flavopiridol on B-cell lymphoma.
When Staudt tested how flavopiridol inhibited genes, he was surprised to find that off transcription in a multitude. Yet rather than killing all the cell types targeted cancer flavopiridol. Puzzled, Staudt decided to measure how long the mRNA of each of 5000 genes lasts after treatment with flavopiridol. In September 13 issue of Genome Biology , the team Staudt reports that the mRNA of sustainability relates to gene function. The genes known to participate in cell death or cell division, two processes which, when awry, contribute to cancer, often had short mRNA. Once flavopiridol hit the cell, genes with short mRNA could not do more of it and mRNA rapidly degraded.
"He has a general effect on transcription, and patients are not Keeling more," said cancer researcher John Reed of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "It's pretty amazing. "
Related Sites The drug is being tested in small groups of patients (but none with a B-cell lymphoma), but Reed cautions that it is difficult to predict how successfully the drug against cancer.
research paper in Genome Biology
more on the way the flavopiridol of Journal of Biological Chemistry
Staudt laboratory Web site
Reed lab website
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