5000 drug combinations using 100 Cancer Drugs, trial

marie77

5000 drug combinations using 100 Cancer Drugs, trial

marie77

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-scientists-combinations-cancer-drugs-effective.html

Oncoligists now believe it will take a combination of drug treatments

to turn Cancer into a Chronic Disease. To complicate things its believed

some Cancer Drugs will only work in combination, which may mean trying

1000 s of previously failed phase 1 drugs again  in  new combination trials

mkkjd60

Thanks for the post Marie.  I hate the feeling that this is a daunting task! My mom needs help now for her stage iv bc.  A cure would be a gift, but we will take chronic too!

leggo

That is depressing. Makes you kind of feel defeated.....and that research will be taking ten steps back. Sigh.

gpawelski

The goal to identify novel drug combinations that are more active than the single agents alone. Since there are number of already approved agents, there is the potential to rapidly translate these combinations into the clinic.

Cancer treatments often use a combination of drugs, as a single drug rarely produces a long-lasting response due to the cancer becoming drug resistant.

Some drug combinations have evolved over time by incorporating new agents into existing standards of care, while many newer treatments try to select combinations of drugs that target particular pathways that are known to be involved in the development of the cancer.

However, some combinations can be so toxic that they have to be used at lower doses that may not be effective against the cancer.

In addition, there are a large number of drug combinations that have never been used together in patients, and for which there is no experimental information on whether there might a benefit to the combination.

The application of combination therapy may represent one of the most important applications of the functional cytometric profiling platform, enabling clinicians to explore both anticipated and unanticipated favorable interactions.

Equally important may be the platform's capacity to study drug antagonism wherein two effective drugs counteract each others' benefits. This phenomenon, characterized by the whole being less than the sum of the parts, represents a major pitfall for clinical trialists who simply combine drugs because they can.

Functional cytometric profiling consists of a combination of a (cell morphology) morphologic endpoint and one or more (cell metabolism) metabolic endpoinsts. It studies cells in small clusters or microspheroids (microclusters). The combination of measuring morphologic (structural) effects and metabolic effects constitutes the measuring of a profile at the whole cell level.

These analyses are revolutionizing the way functional cytometric profiling applies newer classes of drugs and has the potential to accelerate drug development and clinical therapeutics. Good outcomes require good drugs, but better outcomes require good combinations. Intelligent combinations are a principle focus of functional cytometric profiling.

Combination therapy has become standard treatment in many oncological protocols: concoctions of two or more agents which supposedly will attack the tumor in different ways. The ability of various agents to kill tumor and/or microvascular cells (anti-angiogenesis) in the same tumor specimen is highly variable among the different agents.

There are so many agents out there now, doctors have a confusing array of choices. They don't know how to mix them together in the right order.

Data show conclusively that patients benefit both in terms of response and survival from drugs and drug combinations found to be 'active' in functional cytometric profiling assays even after treatment failure with several other drugs, many of which are in the same class, and even with combinations of drugs found to have low or no activity as single agents, but which are found in the assay to produce a synergistic and not merely an additive anti-tumor effect.

Functional cytometric profiling assay labs have always tested drugs in combination with each other, simultaneously measuring direct antitumor activity and antivascular activity.

ihatesnowihatesnow

Check out this research group

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/24/public-cure-cancer-cell-slider_n_2007968.html