News Focus
News Focus
icon url

BonelessCat

11/17/14 4:06 PM

#78656 RE: FarmaZutical #78652

While the correlation between p53 and p21 levels were established 20 years ago, a 100% correlationship is not the case: "The lack of an absolute correlation between p21 expression and the status of the p53 gene in ovarian cancers is consistent with other studies that have suggested that p21 may also be regulated by p53-independent pathways." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9816335 This remains the case today.

However, the successful use in clinical trials of a drug to up-regulate p53 has very little precedent. CTIX is on the frontier and absolute statements must be avoided until other data points--apoptosis, tumor shrinkage, lesion healing, return of normal function--are collected and fully analyzed. Most in the field seem to agree that up-regulation of p53 co-occurs with increased presence of p21, but in practice I doubt this has been observed in anything more than xenograft studies.

Caution and guarded words with a knowing wink seems to be the rule until data sets are complete.