Researchers Use 'Decoy' Molecule to Treat Cancer

Jerry Rivers writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that scientists in British Columbia have successfully used a 'decoy' molecule to shrink advanced prostate tumors. Citing a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the the Globe story explains how the researchers are the first to find a way to block the process of androgen reception in cells and prevent, a key trigger in the onset of prostate cancer."

Article

[The Step Child]

Here's a link to the abstract from the original paper:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/4/133 1 [pnas.org]

Re:Only problem is..

[Teun]

Sad thing is that *if* a treatment ever makes it to the market, it won't be until 5 or 10 years from now.

All too true, litigation after (sometimes perceived) errors by scientists and drug companies has caused reluctance to make new medicines rapidly available.

But in cases of terminal illness such reluctance has more than once been overruled as a potentially failed treatment is never worse than the alternative.
From TFA:

But Dr. Sadar said the researchers are confident that their findings will quickly lead to a human drug that, while it might initially be used to treat advanced prostate cancer patients, might eventually be developed for use at earlier stages, to avoid prostate surgery.

"I don't think we're years and years away from it," she said of the creation of a drug. "Now that the paper has just come out there will certainly be pharmaceutical companies that will be jumping on this. I believe this is a paper, or work, that will cascade, to have very rapid screening against this therapeutic target," she said.

Re:Soon, soon, soon....

[Anonymous Coward]

We had X-Prize for getting into space. Can we not get C-Prize started to find a cure for cancer? With all the hacking skills in the tech world I am certain we could nip cancer in the bud if that talent was applied to hacking the disease.

Cancer is a group of diseases with different genetic causes, so it's highly unlikely that there will ever be a single cure. There might be a breakthrough in the distant future with regard to gene therapy, but cancer "cures" will have to be tailored to each type of cancer. Also, there are many, many people already who are and have been devoting their entire lives to cancer research.

A little more info

[DrKyle]

They used a truncated portion of the steroid receptor that makes the cells divide, it would competitively inhibit the real receptors from triggering cell division.

They managed to test against human tumors which had been xenografted into mice, they packaged their new therapeutic transgene into a modified lentivirus then injected the virus directly into the tumor site.

While this result is promising, it suffers from the same drawbacks as many gene therapies: we can figure out what to put into the cell to fix it, but the big problem is finding a very effective vehicle (virus) to target a high proportion of the required cells.