Overcoming Resistance To Targeted Cancer Drug

Main Category: Colorectal Cancer Also Included In: Cancer / Oncology ; MRSA / Drug Resistance Article Date: 09 Sep 2011 - 0:00 PDT Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and colleagues overseas have discovered a pair of backup circuits in cancer cells that enable the cells to dodge the effect of a widely used cancer drug.

[gdpawel]

When a targeted drug is administered, perhaps it is not effective to the whole cancer cell, when trying to kill one or a few targets on or within the cancer cell? Is there something more elemental going on? Does the drug even enter the cell? Once entered, does it immediately get metabolized or pumped out, or does it accumulate?

The cell-based functional profiling platform can provide a window on the complexity of cellular biology in real-time, gauging tumor cell response to chemotherapies (conventional and targeted). By examining drug induced cell-death, functional analyses measure the cumulative result of all of a cell's mechanisms of resistance and response acting in concert. Functional profiling approximates the cancer of the "individual" not populations.

In photomicrographs of cell-based assays, it is fairly easy to see that some clones of tumor cells don't accumulate a drug. These cells won't get killed by it. But you wouldn't pick this up with an assay which only measured the mechanism (pathway) themselves. The functional profiling platform measures the net effect of everything which goes on (whole cell profiling). Are the cells ultimately killed, or aren't they?

There is really no right mutation or wrong mutation. There are the right drugs and the wrong drugs. There are "sensitive" drugs and there are "resistant" drugs. Patients would certainly have a better chance of success had their cancer been "chemo-sensitive" rather than "chemo-resistant" where it is more apparent that chemotherapy improves the survival of patients, and where identifying the most effective chemotherapy would be more likely to improve survival.

[Phil Gray]

gdpawel wrote:

When a targeted drug is administered, perhaps it is not effective to the whole cancer cell, when trying to kill one or a few targets on or within the cancer cell? Is there something more elemental going on? Does the drug even enter the cell? Once entered, does it immediately get metabolized or pumped out, or does it accumulate?
The cell-based functional profiling platform can provide a window on the complexity of cellular biology in real-time, gauging tumor cell response to chemotherapies (conventional and targeted). By examining drug induced cell-death, functional analyses measure the cumulative result of all of a cell's mechanisms of resistance and response acting in concert. Functional profiling approximates the cancer of the "individual" not populations.
In photomicrographs of cell-based assays, it is fairly easy to see that some clones of tumor cells don't accumulate a drug. These cells won't get killed by it. But you wouldn't pick this up with an assay which only measured the mechanism (pathway) themselves. The functional profiling platform measures the net effect of everything which goes on (whole cell profiling). Are the cells ultimately killed, or aren't they?
There is really no right mutation or wrong mutation. There are the right drugs and the wrong drugs. There are "sensitive" drugs and there are "resistant" drugs. Patients would certainly have a better chance of success had their cancer been "chemo-sensitive" rather than "chemo-resistant" where it is more apparent that chemotherapy improves the survival of patients, and where identifying the most effective chemotherapy would be more likely to improve survival.

O please Doctor Lawrence A Smiley, please cure me!
I have no sex organs whatever. So the gays don't want me and the straights don't want me and the transsexabbles dont want me and none of the women or N-words or jews or mexicans or flatlanders want me. Give me something to make me forgert.