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VA / UC DAVIS RESEARCHERS TAKE AIM AT
KIDNEY
CANCER -- Have come across a way to block a
cancer
gene's own repair mechanism and make chemotherapy
more effective for kidney cancer patients.
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http://www.bizjournals.co
m/sacramento/stories/2008/12/22/daily57.html
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UC Davis researchers take aim at kidney cancer
Sacramento Business Journal
University of California Davis Cancer Center researchers have come across
a way to block a cancer gene’s own repair mechanism and make chemotherapy
more effective for kidney cancer patients.
The findings, considered the first of its kind, are published in the
Cancer Biology and Therapy report.
 “Cancer
cells are notorious in their ability to rapidly create copies of
themselves,” said Robert Weiss, a UC Davis professor of nephrology and
chief of nephrology at the Sacramento Veterans’ Affairs Hospital. “While
the latest medications slow down that process, they do not tend to be
curative and have many side effects. We wanted to find ways to help make
chemotherapeutics as effective as possible at the lowest doses possible.”
New chemotherapy medications destabilize cancer cells at the DNA level,
reducing their ability to replicate, Weiss said in a news release. He was
aware that the p21 gene has a critical role in restoring cancer cell DNA
and possibly circumventing the benefits of those treatments, so Weiss
focused on identifying compounds that could interrupt the pathway.
The team tested thousands of compounds and determined that 12 bind to the
recombinant protein p21. Three of the compounds decreased p21 expression,
blocking kidney cancer cells’ ability to recover and increase their
responsiveness to treatments.
“The results are very exciting, especially given how difficult kidney
cancer has so far been to treat,” Weiss said. “Our work offers hope that
in the future these p21 inhibitors can be refined and used in concert with
other conventional as well as novel cancer treatments to increase the
comfort and life spans of patients with kidney cancer.”
 Now,
Weiss and his team will focus on three candidate compounds to determine
the lowest concentrations that will remain effective and to optimize their
anti-cancer properties. He will test those compounds with standard
treatments in animal models and, if successful, later in human trials.
“The goal is to find new approaches to treating a cancer for which few
options currently exist and make those approaches available in clinical
settings as quickly as possible,” he said.
Other authors in the study are See-Hyoung Park, Xiaobing Wang, Riuwi Liu
and Kit Lam. The research was supported by the National Cancer Institute,
U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Morris Animal Foundation, National
Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
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posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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