City of Hope initiates Phase 2 clinical trial to investigate if mushroom tablets could slow prostate cancer
City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, is now recruiting patients for a Phase 2 clinical trial to investigate whether pills containing white button mushroom extract could regulate the immune system, affecting prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels to either remain stable or decline. Heightened levels of PSA in men may indicate the existence of prostate tumors.
Shiuan Chen, Ph.D., the Lester M. and Irene C. Finkelstein Chair in Biology, has been investigating the potential beneficial effects of white button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) at City of Hope for about 20 years. His translational preclinical and clinical research has found that this bioactive food available in most supermarkets might prevent or slow the spread of prostate and breast cancers. The common fungus appears to block
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IMAGE: Shiuan Chen, Ph.D., the Lester M. and Irene C. Finkelstein Chair in Biology, has been investigating the potential beneficial effects of white button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) at City of Hope. view more
Credit: City of Hope
DUARTE, Calif. City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, is now recruiting patients for a Phase 2 clinical trial to investigate whether pills containing white button mushroom extract could regulate the immune system, affecting prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels to either remain stable or decline. Heightened levels of PSA in men may indicate the existence of prostate tumors.
Share Our initial study results are very promising and show that this oncolytic virus injection, a modified coxsackievirus, when combined with existing immunotherapy is not only safe but has the potential to work better against melanoma than immunotherapy alone, said Dr. Janice Mehnert, the study s senior investigator and a medical oncologist, in a statement.
Mehnert cautioned that further testing, which is already underway, would have to prove successful before the combination treatment could become a standard of care, or go-to therapy, for patients with advanced melanoma, meaning melanoma that has spread to other parts of the body.
She added that the next phase of clinical trials will involve patients with melanoma that has become widespread, as well as in patients whose tumors, if shrunken by the drug combination, could be more easily removed by surgery.
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Early results show that a new combination drug therapy is safe and effective against advanced skin cancer in patients who were not able to have their tumors surgically removed.
The drug combination is among the first, researchers say, to demonstrate the potential value of a live common cold virus, a coxsackievirus, to infect and kill cancer cells.
The Phase I study, led by a researcher at NYU Langone Health and its Perlmutter Cancer Center, is also among the first to show how such oncolytic viruses can safely boost the action of widely used cancer therapies that help the body s immune defense system detect and kill cancer cells. Currently, such immunotherapies are only effective in shrinking melanoma tumors in just over a third of patients who receive them.