Experts find protein linked to cervical and breast cancer drug resistance
For many women suffering from breast and ovarian cancer, a key part of their treatment is chemotherapy drugs known as taxanes, but many people can build up a resistance to this medication, preventing effective treatment.
However, specialists in the US believe they may have found the reason why the drugs fail to act, in the form of a protein known as prohibitin1.
According to specialists at the Children's Hospital Boston, this protein is responsible for blocking the effects of Taxol and Taxotere, which are two commonly used medications following chemotherapy.
The study was led by Dr Bruce Zetter, from the Children's Vascular Biology Programme, who used targeted techniques to compare the various proteins in tumours which were susceptible to Taxol and cancers which were not.
He discovered that the drug-resistant tumours had prohibitin1 on their surface and the others did not, and now the team says that it could be possible to use an extra form of medication which targets the protein and allows the cancer drugs to get through to the tumour.
"We are working to target various cancer drugs to taxane-resistant cells by attaching them to compounds that bind to prohibitin1," Dr Zetter explained.
The expert added that the discovery may not have occurred at all if the team had not been looking at a specific formation of cells, but is now hopeful that the findings can lead to the new drugs being developed and potentially saving the lives of the 12,000 breast cancer sufferers and 4,000 ovarian cancer patients who die from the diseases each year.
"It was up-regulated primarily on the cell surface. The fact that [prohibitin1] moves to the cell surface also makes it easier to direct drugs to it," he concluded.
Posted by James McCann
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