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BOSTON - New research led by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) points to a promising strategy to boost tumors intake of cancer drugs, thereby increasing the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments. The group s findings are published in
Getting enough anticancer drugs into a tumor is often difficult, and a potential strategy to overcome this challenge involves binding the medications to albumin, the most abundant protein in blood. The strategy relies on tumors large appetite for protein nutrients that fuel malignant growth. When consuming available albumin, the tumors will inadvertently take in the attached drugs.
A popular albumin-bound drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is nanoparticle albumin-bound paclitaxel (nab-PTX), and it has been successfully used to treat late-stage lung and pancreatic cancers. Not all patients respond to nab-PTX, though, and the effectiveness of its delivery to tumors has been mixed, owing to an incomplete u
Reporting in
Nature Communications on Feb. 9, they describe how cellular survival after radiation exposure depends on behavior of p53 over time. In vulnerable tissues, p53 levels go up and remain high, leading to cell death. In tissues that tend to survive radiation damage, p53 levels oscillate up and down.
“Dynamics matter. How things change over time matters,” said co-corresponding author Galit Lahav, the Novartis Professor of Systems Biology at HMS. “Our ability to understand biology is limited when we only look at snapshots. By seeing how things evolve temporally, we gain much richer information that can be critical for dissecting diseases and creating new therapies.”