drug resistance tagged posts

Drug resistance is a major obstacle in cancer treatment – leading to relapse for many patients. In a new study, published online April 20, 2020, in Nature Cell Biology, researchers from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Children’s Mercy Kansas City, and The University of Kansas Cancer Center report on a promising new strategy to overcome drug resistance in leukemia, using targeted doses of the widely-used chemotherapy drug doxorubicin.

The study’s researchers found that low doses of the anthracycline antibiotic doxorubicin inhibit the interaction between two molecular pathways that work closely together to promote tumor ...

This is a three-dimensional model of a tumor showing cell types in varying colors. Credit: Bartek Waclaw and Martin Nowak

The new model explains why cancer cells have a surprising number of genetic mutations in common, how driver mutations spread through the whole tumor and how drug resistance evolves. “Previously, we and others have mostly used non-spatial models to study cancer evolution,” Nowak said. “But those models do not describe the spatial characteristics of solid tumors. Now, for the first time, we have a computational model that can do that.”

A key insight of the new model, Nowak said, is the ability for cells to migrate locally. “Cellular mobility makes cancers grow fast, and it makes cancers homogenous in the sense that cancer cells share a common set of mutations...