Tag Archives: drugs

Promising new method for rapidly screening cancer drugs

As Rotello and his doctoral graduate student Le Ngoc, one of the lead authors, explain, to discover a new drug for any disease, researchers must screen billions of compounds, which can take months. One of the added keys to bringing a new drug to market, they add, is to identify how it works, its chemical mechanism. “Rapid determination of drug mechanism would greatly streamline the drug discovery process, opening the pipeline of new therapeutics,” Ngoc says. She adds, “Drugs with different mechanisms cause changes in the surface of cells that can be read out using the new sensor system…

No link found between bladder cancer, use of pioglitazone or rosiglitazone, Avandia — ScienceDaily

Bladder cancer is the ninth most common cancer in the world, with 430,000 new cases diagnosed in 2012. Europe and North America have the highest incidence of bladder cancer, with an even higher incidence in people with diabetes. Bladder tumours overexpress a natural part of the cell machinery, a transcription factor in the cell nucleus known as ‘peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma’ (or PPARγ) that is found in the urothelium (the lining of the urinary tract). Both pioglitazone and rosiglitazone are part of the thiazolidinediones (TZDs) class of drugs, which act as PPARγ agonists, meaning they induce the same action as PPARγ…

New molecules to burst malaria’s bubble

A new paper in PNAS is the third published recently by a group at the Australian National University (ANU). The group has collaborated with scientists from around the globe to uncover potential ammunition in the fight against malaria. Over 200 million people contract malaria each year, and the parasite that causes the disease has become resistant to most of the drugs currently available…

One-two punch of drugs better than either alone against colorectal cancer

Of course, researchers have extensively targeted these two signaling pathways, designing drugs that turn on or off genes in these pathways, thus interrupting the transmission of cancer-causing signals. Unfortunately, these pathways have proven difficult to drug and also it has been difficult to show the effectiveness of drugs that successfully interrupt the transmission of signals along these pathways. A study by the University of Colorado Cancer Center published in the journal PLoS ONE and concurrent phase I clinical trial is examining a new strategy: targeting both these important cancer-causing pathways simultaneously. “Well, these two pathways are mutated frequently in cancer. …

Combination treatment for metastatic melanoma results in longer overall survival

F. Stephen Hodi, M.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, and colleagues conducted a phase 2 clinical trial in which 245 patients with unresectable (unable to be removed by surgery) stage Ill or IV melanoma were randomly assigned to receive ipilimumab (intravenously) on day 1 plus sargramostim (injected beneath the skin) on days 1 to 14 of a 21-day cycle (n = 123) or ipilimumab alone (n = 122). The researchers compared the effect of these treatments on length of overall survival, progression-free survival, response rate, safety, and tolerability…

Immune booster combined with checkpoint blocker improves survival in metastatic melanoma

Patients in the clinical trial who got the combined therapies also had fewer serious adverse side effects than those who received only ipilimumab, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The group treated with both ipilimumab and the immune stimulant, called sargramostim, had a one-year survival rate of 68.9 percent vs. 52.9 percent in the ipilimumab-only group. In both groups, however, the median progression-free survival (the length of time before the cancer began to grow) was similar – 3.1 months…

Hidden subpopulation of melanoma cells discovered

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, provides evidence for how these particular melanoma cells help tumors resist drugs designed to block blood vessel formation. “For a long time the hope has been that anti-angiogenic therapies would starve tumors of the nutrients they need to thrive, but these drugs haven’t worked as well as we all had hoped,” said Andrew C…

Nivolumab shows signs of superior response rate compared to standard chemotherapy in advanced melanoma

“Previously-treated advanced melanoma patients have limited options,” says the study’s principal investigator, Professor Jeffrey Weber, Director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research Center of Excellence at the Moffitt Cancer Centre, Tampa, Florida. Nivolumab is an antibody in a class of drugs called ‘checkpoint inhibitors’, that act to relieve a critical brake placed on the immune system by the tumour itself. The drug then reinvigorates patients’ anti-tumour immune response and promotes shrinkage of the tumour…