Anyone heard of this before??

smokeyjoe
smokeyjoe Member Posts: 1,425 Member
in Colorectal Cancer #1
New cancer drug sabotages tumour's escape route
15:40 24 February 2012 by Andy Coghlan
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Some untreatable cancers could soon be held in check by an experimental drug that targets not only the tumour itself, but also how it evolves to spread through the body.

The new drug, Cabozantinib, or cabo for short, simultaneously neutralises two mechanisms cancers need to survive. First, it chokes each tumour's blood supply by blocking a molecule on the surface of its blood vessels, called vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR). There is evidence in animals that cancers can respond to this kind of attack by invading new tissues, where they may be able to generate secondary tumours. Importantly, cabo foils this strategy by blocking a second receptor called c-MET that would otherwise help cancer cells spread to new tissue.

Comments

  • janie1
    janie1 Member Posts: 753 Member
    #2
    Hey Smokey.
    Is there any mention of it for CC? I hope so, but I'm not seeing it mentioned.
    Sounds good.
  • smokeyjoe
    smokeyjoe Member Posts: 1,425 Member
    #3
    janie1 said:

    Hey Smokey.
    Is there any mention of it for CC? I hope so, but I'm not seeing it mentioned.
    Sounds good.

    Cabozantinib (XL184)They
    Cabozantinib (XL184)
    They were looking for drugs to treat the inflammation seen in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. They tested a compound called a PPAR-gamma modulator. It would never normally have been thought of as a cancer drug, or in fact a drug of any kind. They ran several tests and found the compound killed pretty much every epithelial tumor cell lines they have seen. Epithelial cells line organs such as the colon, and also make up skin.

    They reported in the journal International Cancer Research that it killed colon tumors in mice without making the mice sick. The compound worked in much the same way as the taxane drugs, including Taxol, which were originally derived from Pacific yew trees. It targets part of the cell cytoskeleton called tubulin. Tubulin is used to build microtubules, which in turn make up the cell's structure.

    Destroying it kills the cell, but cancer cells eventually evolve mechanisms to pump out the drugs that do this, a problem called resistance. Resistance to anti-tubulin therapies, like Taxol, is a huge problem in many cancers. They see this as another way to get to the tubulin. The PPAR-gamma compound does this in a different way from the taxanes, which might mean it could overcome the resistance that tumor cells often develop to chemotherapy.
    This is what I found on the internet....I don't know sounds pretty exciting to me!!! It's in clinical trials apparently for other cancers. Why they didn't do clinical trial for colon cancer I cannot figure that one out.

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