A medication tested on mice has proven effective in treating cancerous tumours by attacking the blood vessels that feed them, according to a report to be published on Tuesday.
”This is like a ‘Trojan horse’ approach to kill the blood vessels that supply solid tumours without effecting healthy cells,” said Dr. Michael Rosenblum, main author of the study appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
”We’re using the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) as a carrier to deliver a toxic agent selectively to the tumour’s blood supply, in effect starving the tumour,” said Rosenblum, who is a professor of medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, which is attached to the University of Texas.
The growth factor, used here as a vector, is a protein capable of inducing endothelial cell reproduction which line the heart, blood vessels, and lymph glands.
In the study mice were injected with human cells infected with prostate and melanoma cancers.
The tumours of the mice treated shrank to less than 16% of the tumours in untreated mice, said Dr. Philip Thorpe, professor of pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre at Dallas, who also participated in the study.
A clinical trail of the drug is scheduled for later this year at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre, where the treatment was developed, said Rosenblum.
The treatment is a new direction of anti-cancer research which circumvents a major problem of chemotherapy – capacity of the tumours to mutate and become resistant to the drugs. – Sapa-AFP