- ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek
scientists said they have found a way to lower cancer cell resistance to
medical treatment in what could be a major step in treating a disease that
kills more than six million people every year.
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- The procedure, which only recently started testing on
animals, could make chemotherapy more effective at significantly reduced
dosages and eliminate many of its side effects.
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- The key lies in 'switching off' Apolipoprotein J, also
known as clusterin or Apo J for short, a protein used by healthy and diseased
cells alike as a shield against attacks, Stathis Gonos, leader of the research
team, told Reuters on Monday.
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- "Our research was looking at genetic and environmental
factors related to aging, and that is how we found the function of Apo
J in healthy cells is to act as a shield, or 'survival factor', against
toxic factors in the environment," Gonos said.
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- "Our next step was to investigate whether Apo J
has a similar function in cancer cells, and indeed saw that it retains
the same function of defending cells, shielding them from e.g. chemotherapy
prescribed by a doctor to treat cancer," he added.
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- Cells react to what they perceive as an assault with
all the weapons they have, producing vast quantities of Apo J as a shield
against the attack, be that an infection or an anti-cancer drug.
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- "We used a new technology called RNA Interference
to silence the expression of Apo J and saw that in the case of cancer cells
they became a lot more fragile and this made it a lot easier to kill them
with normal chemo," Gonos said.
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- "We had spectacular results even when using a tenth
of the usual dosage," he added, "and this means that many of
the side-effects of chemotherapy will likely disappear as we are able to
reduce dosages."
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- Many patients undergoing chemotherapy experience anemia,
nausea, hair loss or infection due to low blood cell counts.
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- The Greek team, who are financed by the European Union
, have submitted a global patent application in partnership with Canadian
biotech firm OncoGeneX and scientists from the University of British Columbia.
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- They have recently started animal trials at Vancouver
General Hospital, with Gonos forecasting human trials to start in between
three and five years.
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- According to data from the World Health Organization
news -'s World Cancer Report, in the year 2000 alone around ten million
people worldwide developed a malignant tumor and more than six million
died of the disease.
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