Tags:
Journalism of Courage
NEWPORT BEACH, MARCH 24: Scientists have wiped out hard-to-treat tumors by using a cancer drug trapped in a mixture as thick as honey. The syrupy liquid kept the drug right on working in the tumor instead of leaking away.
So far, the strategy has worked mostly with tumors in the mouth and throat, but it might also work against cancers in the liver and recurrences of breast tumors, said researcher Harinder Garewal of the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson.
Anti-cancer drugs are normally injected into the bloodstream. But that means they circulate through the body and affect normal tissue, so doctors have to limit doses to hold down side effects.
Scientists have studied getting around that problem in a number of ways. For example, a surgically implanted wafer that slowly releases a drug is used to treat some brain cancers. Garewal described another solution yesterday at a conference sponsored by the American Cancer Society. He and colleagues treated patients with a mix of the standard drug cisplatin, theblood-vessel constrictor epinephrine, and a syrupy liquid that gets about as thick as honey when it reaches body temperature.
The idea is that when this mixture is injected into a tumor, the epinephrine restricts blood flow out of the tumor and the honey-like gel holds onto the cisplatin. As the gel breaks down, the cisplatin slowly leaks out, remaining highly concentrated in the tumor. Because of that concentration, only small amounts of cisplatin have to be injected, too little to cause side effects, Garewal said.
Patients got weekly injections of the experimental mixture, and by the third treatment the effect was obvious, Garewal said. While the cancers had resisted prior treatment, the mixture wiped out tumors in 32 patients and shrank them by at least half in nine others, Garewal said.
