The technique is meant to help oncologists select the best course of treatment

Oct 31, 2011 19:01 GMT  ·  By

Being able to determine which patients will benefit from which combination of chemotherapy drugs would be of great use for oncologists trying to find the best possible type of medication for every type of cancer. A new test has recently been developed to fulfill this need.

The laboratory test shows how efficient each possible combination of chemotherapy drugs is against every type of cancer cell. The efficiency level will be judged on how many tumor cells are killed, as well as how many are weakened.

During the new investigation – which was carried out on a number of patient samples collected from several hospitals – researchers were able to discover that the various types of chemotherapy were significantly more effective against cancer cells that were already about to self-destruct.

What this implies is that the drugs provided these diseased cells with the extra push they needed to fall into oblivion. Interestingly enough, the team also discovered why chemotherapy is sometimes less effective against several forms of fast-spreading cancers.

One of the main principles in cancer biology is that drug cocktails tend to affect fast-spreading tumors more than slow-spreading ones. Yet, chemotherapy is less effective against highly-invasive pancreatic cancer than against less-invasive ones, such as chronic myelogenous leukemia.

What the team determined is that the decisive factor in determining the efficiency of cancer treatment is how close tumor cells are of reaching the end of a type of cellular suicide known as apoptosis. This implies that the speed at which the cancers develop is not that important in determining treatment success rates.

The research team was led by associate professor Anthony Leta, who holds joint appointments at the Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Details of the research appear in last week's online issue of the journal Sciencexpress, Technology Review reports.

“This is a very important paper,” comments HMS systems biology professor Peter Sorger, who was not a part of the investigation. Finding out which patients are more likely to respond to chemotherapy is “the key issue in contemporary cancer pharmacology – individualizing treatments so specific drugs are given to patients likely to respond,” he concludes.