New anti-cancer pill

[pibikay]

Hello All
While waiting in the hospital for Hema's PET.CT tobe over I saw a couple of press cuttings in the notice board about a new wonder pill discovered in the UK which is effective against all types of cancer.May I request any one who is in the know of such developments post a link please
Thanks

[Ellie F]

Hi
I live in England but have not heard about this. Will try to find out.

Ellie

[pibikay]

Hello
I managed to get the full nes item from the Tomes of India and I am giving below the news story.Pl excuse if there are typos
"Wonder Drug' to treat all cancers?
Breast Cancer Pill Tweaked to Target Tumours,MiniMize side effects
London" A universal drug against all cancers may be on the anvil say scientists who claim to have discovereda methodof turning breast cancer"wonder pill"efective againstall types of tumour.In addition side effectssuch as nausea and tiredness should be minimal according to a team of Newcastle University
The excitment centres on a family of cancer drugs known as PARP inhibitors which affect the way tumour cells repair themselvesThese target heriditary forms of breast cancer as well as ovarian prostate cancers and pancreatic tumours with the sane rogue gene The drugs are of particular interest to doctors as they zero inon the tumour and kill it without harming healthy cells.This means patients suffer fewer side effects than they would with chemptherapy or radiotherapy in which healthy cells are affected
The drugs exploit the achiless heel of heriditary form of breast cancer caused by a flaw in a gene called BRCA1which limits the cells ability to repair damage to their DNA.Healthy cels have two ways of patching up damage-which allows them to breed grow and spread-but cells in BCRA tumours have only one
PARP inhibitors block this remaining pathway stopping the tumour cells from multiplying eventually leading them to die
Some breast ovarian and prostate tumours too have flawed BCRA genes but account for a small proportion of all cancers
The research will allow the drugs to be used on tumours which do not have this genetic flaw by effectively "recreating" the defect say the scientists.
In expriments with mice with lung tumours the team showed that blocking a molecule called Cdk1 also stopped DNA repair.When rats were given a PARP inhibitor it successfully shrunk their cancer.The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine
End of the news story
I wanted to share it with all of you

[Rich66]

A link to similar: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2008366/Breast-cancer-wonder-drug-fight-tumours.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

[ElaineM]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parp_inhibitor

http://www.breastcancer.org/treatment/targeted_therapies/new_research/20090624.jsp

[tricia keegan]

I read this the other day on a U.K site I moderate, many of my triple neg friends are in this trial and it looks promising for them but think the headline was to sell newspapers rather than print the truth!!!
I haven't seen anything to think it would be helpful for her+ cancer!

[SoCalGal]

Mostly BRCA gene positive and triple negative profiles have good results with the PARP inhibitor. It's been in clinical trial in Los Angeles for several years.

[Rich66]

An encouraging bit on this in the article above is if they can trick a tumor into being vulnerable to PARP inhibs, might be more broadly helpful. Here's a cure-ious bit in CURE about Inaparib:

http://www.curetoday.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/article.show/id/2/article_id/1713

When responses from newly diagnosed women were separated out from those of previously treated women, the numbers suggested another story. For reasons yet unknown, women with one to two prior treatments for advanced breast cancer seemed to improve on the drug when looking at both progression-free survival (4.2 months versus 2.9 months) and overall survival (10.8 months versus 8.1 months).Maybe the pretreatment induces changes to the cells that make them them PARP inhib vulnerable.