sciientists reprogram cancer cells with low doses of epigenetic drugs and kill breast

[Rich66]

What's especially nice about this, but not mentioned is that these two drugs appear to be available:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decitabine
It is a hypomethylating agent.[1][2] It hypomethylates DNA by inhibiting DNA methyltransferase. It functions in a similar manner to azacitidine, although decitabine can only be incorporated into DNA strands while azacitidine can be incorporated into both DNA and RNA chains.


Azacitidine (INN) or 5-azacytidine, sold under the trade name Vidaza, is a chemical analogue of cytidine, a nucleoside present in DNA and RNA. Azacitidine and its deoxy derivative, decitabine (also known as 5-aza-2′deoxycytidine), are used in the treatment of myelodysplastic syndrome


It seems like these two might be usable as a treatment themselves or as chemo "primers", given before more standard treatment allowing avoidance of overlapping toxicities.

I'd be very curious about this preceeding low dose metronomic chemo and/or vaccines/immune approaches.

[gdpawel]

Scientists can only explain a small proportion of a person's predisposition to complex diseases based on genetics alone. Epigenetics could provide the missing link. And the distinction between epigenetic changes and genetic changes is that epigenetic changes appear to be reversible.

Epigenetics is a whole new science with important implications for the treatment of disease, most notably cancer. Epigenetics is the study of molecular modifications which sit on top of the DNA in our cells, in effect switching our genes on and off, telling our cells how they should behave.

Scientists are now realizing that if those epigenetic markings are disrupted, causing a gene to become incorrectly active or silent, a healthy cell could become diseased. Research is beginning to uncover the mechanisms behind these switches and the circumstances under which changes occur.

We have hundreds of genes which, when working properly, keep healthy cells in check. These can be disrupted by damage directly to their DNA, but it's now been realized that epigenetic changes could also be responsible. A common epigenetic change in cancers is DNA methylation, which silences genes.

Almost every cancer cell has problems with the epigenetic programming, so an increasing focus of research has been to find drugs which can remove these chemical changes. Rather than killing cancer cells, decitabine and azacitidine remove the aberrant methylation, reactivating genes which had been silenced.