| New cancer drug could aid thousands
Thousands of patients suffering breast and prostate cancer could benefit from a new drug, experts have said. Cancers such as breast and prostate are often fuelled by sex hormones, including oestrogen or testosterone. Many patients can benefit from hormone therapies aimed at cutting levels of these hormones, thereby "starving" the cancer and halting tumour growth. But some people have cancers that are resistant to such treatments while others build up a resistance to the hormone drugs. Such "hormone-independent" cancer cells are a major challenge to treat and current therapies are limited. Now a study by researchers at Imperial College London, published in the British Journal of Cancer, has revealed promising results for a new drug, STX140.
15-year-old heads up effort to fight grandma's cancer
There are many ways to fight cancer: drugs, homeopathic medicines, chemotherapy, radiation. It can also be fought with a grandchild's love.Shirley Smalling, 69, got the phone call one year ago this month and the doctor was brief and to the point: You have infiltrating ductal carcinoma - in layman's terms, breast cancer.“That's not the news you want to hear," Smalling said.With heavy hearts, the family gathered at Smalling's Dillard Road farm as usual that Sunday after church for lunch.The weekly gathering has always been a special event for Shirley and Victor Smalling's three children and five grandchildren.“As long as I can remember, it's always been lunch at Grandma's house after church," said Victoria Dickson, the Smallings' 15-year-old granddaughter. “The first word out of everyone's mouth as babies is 'grandma.' "Shirley Smalling has endured months of radiation treatment and is now taking medication to fight the disease.Victoria, always the organizer in the family, has decided to tackle the disease in her own way.“I was sitting in church one Sunday and it just came to me," she said.
New computational technique can predict drug side effects
Early identification of adverse effects of drugs before they are tested in humans is crucial in developing new therapeutics, as unexpected effects account for a third of all drug failures during the development process. Now researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have developed a novel technique using computer modeling to identify potential side effects of pharmaceuticals, and have used the technique to study a class of drugs that includes tamoxifen, the most prescribed drug in the treatment of breast cancer. Their study is currently available on line at PLoS Computational Biology. Conventional test methods screen compounds in animal studies in advance of human trials in the hope of identifying the side effects of promising therapeutics. The UCSD team � led by Philip Bourne, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology at UCSD�s Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Lei Xie, Ph.D., of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD � instead uses the power of computational modeling to screen specific drug molecules using a worldwide repository, the Protein Data Bank (PDB), containing tens of thousands of three-dimensional protein structures.
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