Developments for cancer treatments are moving at a fast rate. One of the new words on the block is 'Nanoparticle', one thousandth smaller than a printed period, which researchers are fast incorporating into projected treatments, that may see reduction in radio and chemotherapy treatments in near future!
Prof.Mel Greave's book "Cancer, the Evolutionary Legacy" describes in chapter 8, when cells are damaged or stressed by any one of many different mechanisms, the P53 gene stabilises aggressive activity, enabling it to exercise its function as an alarm system. "A malfunction in the P53 gene alarm is taken as bad news" comments Prof.Greave.
Now, such is the development over past couple of years, has seen a move to assist the P53 gene-path maintained - "Nanoparticles to the rescue!"
With this new buzz word in place, researchers have now delivered functional-P53 genes to tumor cells and tumor metastases in 16 different types of cancer, including prostrate, pancreatic, melanoma, breast, head and neck cancers.
The presence of replacement genes dramatically improved the efficiency of conventional cancer therapy. Dr.Esther Cheng, Georgetown's University Lombardi Cancer centre, said "the use of the P53 delivery system eventually would allow physicians to use lower doses of therapies, achieving same or enhanced theraputic results, sharply diminishing the side-effects so troublesome in many treatments".
With clinical trials progressing, Dr.Cheng is hopeful gene therapy will become front-line treatment that will significantly reduce probability of recurrent tumors.
Acknowledgment sciancedaily.com Geoff
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment