Improved methods to grow patients’ tumor cells in a dish offer opportunities to find durable therapies.
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| FLICKR, ANNE WESTON, LRI, CROK. WELLCOME IMAGES |
Cancers can become resistant
to drugs that once seemed like they could cure a person of the disease.
In the unstopping march toward personalized medicine, researchers
managed to culture drug-resistant lung tumor cells to screen them for
sensitivity to various therapies, finding new and sometimes surprising
drug candidates.
“It’s a substantial step,” Jeffrey Engelman of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center told Time.
“Because before we just had the genetic information but we wouldn’t
have the cells alive so that we could test what types of therapies might
work.”
Engelman and his colleagues published their study in Science last week (November 13). They succeeded in growing cells taken from 20 patients’ tumors. Nature News
pointed out that, in many cases, the drug screens turned up unexpected
candidates. In half of the tumors, for example, a drug that inhibits a
protein called SRC managed to shrink tumor growth in vitro. “There were
no genetic results that would have pointed to that combination,”
Engelman told Nature News.
Engelman’s method has yet to face a clinical challenge; patients’
therapies were not altered based on the screen. “This is really setting
up the criteria for what we have to look at next,” Richard Schlegel,
director of the Center for Cell Reprogramming at Georgetown University
School of Medicine, told the Boston Globe.
“Someone has to figure out if we grow up these cells, how many times is
this going to be an adequate predictor of patient response?”
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| November 17, 2014
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