14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry has recently discovered that administering chemotherapy drugs to people in the earliest stages of bone marrow cancer can actually have a very negative effect on their health.
According to SD Department of Periodontics and Oral Medicine professor, Laurie McCauley, a drug used in most chemotherapy approaches can actually fertilize the bone marrow, thus allowing bone marrow cancer cells to grow and spread faster than they would normally be able to.
This finding could help explain why many cancers tend to metastasize into bones, even as patients undergo dedicated therapies against this phenomenon. In the future, scientists may be able to develop new metastasis-prevention drugs, based on the new discoveries.
McCauley, the principal investigator on the new study, reveals that the chemotherapy drug called cyclophosphamide is responsible for the ill side effect. On the bright side of things, she believes that a solution to this problem may have already been found.
In a series of experiments that they conducted, the U-M team learned that blocking the cell-communicating protein called CCL2 reverses the action of cyclophosphamide. Future drugs could therefore act on CCL2.
“"This work is early and still at the pre-clinical level. However, the biggest potential impact is in metastasis preventive strategies,” McCauley explains. She also holds an appointment with the U-M Heath System Department of Pathology.
“If we better understood the specific mediators, or conditions, in the bone marrow that support tumors, we could develop more effective therapeutics to prevent local cancers from spreading and hence reduce metastasis to the bone,” the expert adds.
Basically, what the new study is suggesting is that the bone marrow provides a perfect location for cancer cells to grow and multiply, before spreading out to other organs, says Serk In Park. The expert, a U-M postdoctoral students, was the first author of the new study.
Details of the work appear in a paper entitled “Cyclophosphamide Creates a Receptive Microenvironment for Prostate Cancer Skeletal Metastasis,” which is published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Cancer Research.