Sunday, October 21, 2012

Clinical Hypothesis in research, prevention and Commercialization Hypothesis in cancer therapeutics

Following our first article of October 14th, we believe it is time to suggest a second hypothesis
in therapeutic  research in Cancer.   The early years of cancer treatment, the objective was to blast the cancer cells with chemotherapy that was in our arsenal. Most of the time this approach was able to kill the cells partially.  The cancer cells quickly however learned to escape the blast, creating wonderful resistance mechanisms.   As we progress in molecular biology, we are increasingly shying away from these blast approaches, leaning more and more in identifying metabolic pathways, and identifying targets in that pathway and aiming our gun and shoot it, and see what happens.  This is called Target Therapy.
One pathway that we have learned a bit about is the P53 ( and down the line the pathway the Rb which lead to cell stopping in the cell cycle to allow genetic repair).  This pathway is mostly triggered by an abnormality in the gene.
Today, we go back to the blast approach when we have no good Target therapy option.  In fact we always try to add the target therapy to the blast chemotherapy to see if we could have the most from our money.
combination of Avastin (a target therapy) to chemotherapy is standard therapy in the United states for stage IV Colon cancer.  We know that chemotherapy mostly affect our gene.  This change in gene should trigger the activation of our P53 system to stop the cancer cell in its track for growth.  The question now is should we give chemotherapy in patient who has an altered P53 system.  What is the benefit the gene with chemotherapy, if the system that should be triggered to clean up is out.

Hypothesis:

Altered P53 pathway predict a failure of chemotherapy which has gene disturbance as main effect.
second hypothesis: preservation of status of the wild type P53 during chemotherapy may predict for a successful chemotherapy treatment (Cisplatin).
 if it is true, commercialization is possible...

Don't be shy, give me your opinion!

1 comment:

Peggy Kankonde said...

What is the benefit of disturbing the gene with chemotherapy, if the P53 system is altered! (correction)