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Another story from BigL on Yahoo worth reading

New therapy prevents lung cancer growth in mice

By smspaz3 · Yesterday at 10:20 am · 2 replies
In Non-small cell lung cancer - Stage IV
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By gpawelski
Reply 3290276
Yesterday at 12:59 pm
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Thanks for this!

Cancer stem cells (CSCs), are aggressive cells thought to be resistant to current anti-cancer therapies and which promote metastasis, are stimulated via a pathway that mirrors normal stem cell development. Disrupting the pathway, researchers are able to halt expansion of CSCs.

One approach is to force the CSCs into a differentiated state, thereby impairing stem characteristics, such as self-renewal. Interference with the Notch, Wnt, or Hedgehog pathways that are thought to regulate differentiation, are strategies that have been proposed.

Erivedge (vismodegib) is one such drug that inhibits Hedgehog signaling by targeting the serpentine receptor Smoothened (SMO), and has produced promising anti-tumor responses in clinical studies of cancers driven by mutations in this pathway.

Breast cancer represents a benchmark for studying the influence of Notch pathways on CSCs. A significant reduction of mammosphere-forming effeciency has been achieved with gamma-secretase inhibitor (GSI). Since a similar effect was seen with the EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor gefitinib, it is conceivable that the dual inhibition of Notch and EGFR may exert a synergistic effect on lung cancer.

And a number of Wnt modulators or inhibitors have been identified like COX-2 inhibitors (celecoxib and rofecoxib). The Wnt activity identifies the colon CSC population.

The capacity to study human tumor microenvironments enables the functional profiling platform to conduct discovery work on the most sophisticated classes of compounds that influence cell signaling at the level of Notch, Hedgehog and Wnt, among others (Gonsalves, F, et al. 2011).


http://www.inspire.com/groups/lung-cancer-survivors/discussion/new-therapy-prevents-lung-cancer-growth-in-mice/