Drug and radiation combination 'may halt lung cancer'
Almost 40,000 people a year are diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK - the equivalent of 107 per day.
It is the second most common form of cancer in the country and can devastate lives, but new research has revealed that the progress of the condition may be stopped with a combination of therapies.
Specialists at the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern have found that a combination of radiation treatment and a cancer drug may be an effective enough remedy to beat the disease.
A team led by Dr Pier Paolo Scaglioni, assistant professor of internal medicine at the institution, said that non-small cell lung cancer (NSCL) can be completely eliminated through a course of treatment including the drug BEZ235 and low-dose radiation.
Dr Scaglioni told those with a health insurance plan that tests on mice revealed the tumours in those given the drug were not only much smaller than in those who did not receive treatment, but also stopped growing.
"These early results suggest that the drug-radiation combination might be an effective therapy in lung cancer patients," he explained.
The specialist added that a key priority now will be to formulate a treatment for patients with mutations in a gene called K-RAS, as these subjects are generally more resistant to therapy.
Dr Georgia Konstantinidou, a postdoctoral researcher at UT Southwestern and co-lead author of the study, told those with affordable health insurance that the key to treating NSCL cancer in patients with K-RAS mutations may be killing a protein called PI3K, which prevents cells from dying.
As part of the investigation, the team exposed isolated cancer cells to BEZ235 followed by low doses of radiation, which induced small breaks in the DNA of the cells but otherwise had no effect on cell survival.
"We stressed the cells in such a way that they needed this signalling pathway to survive. Without the PI3K response, they will die," Dr Scaglioni explained.
By Louise Jones
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