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The Key Ingredient to Effective Cancer Treatments

  • 등록일2010-11-30
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The Key Ingredient to Effective Cancer Treatments

 

 

A startup is developing oxygen-carrying compounds that it says could make radiation therapy more effective in half of all cancer patients.


The Key Ingredient to Effective Cancer Treatments
A startup is developing oxygen-carrying compounds that it says could make radiation therapy more effective in half of all cancer patients.

 

About 50 percent of cancer patients have tumors that are resistant to radiation because of low levels of oxygen—a state known as hypoxia. A startup in San Francisco is developing proteins that could carry oxygen to tumors more effectively, increasing the odds that radiation therapy will help these patients.

 

Last month, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) gave that startup, Omniox, $3 million in funding. Omniox is collaborating with researchers at the NCI to test whether its oxygen-carrying compounds improve radiation therapy in animals with cancer.

 

Most tumors have hypoxic regions, and researchers believe they have a significant impact on treatment outcomes in about half of patients. Tumor cells proliferate with such abandon that they outstrip their blood supply, creating regions with very low levels of oxygen. This lack of oxygen drives tumor cells to generate more blood vessels, which metastatic cells use to travel elsewhere in the body and spread the cancer.

 

Radiation therapy depends on oxygen to work. When ionizing radiation strikes a tumor, it generates reactive chemicals called free radicals that damage tumor cells. Without oxygen, the free radicals are short-lived, and radiation therapy isn't effective. "Radiation treatment is given today on the assumption that tumors are oxygenated" and will be damaged by it, says Murali Cherukuri, chief of biophysics in the Center for Cancer Research at the NCI in Bethesda, Maryland. "Hypoxic regions survive treatment and repopulate the tumor."

 

 

...... (계속)

 

 

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