Scientists from Rice University and elsewhere found potential new drugs that work with other drugs to deliver a deadly one-two punch to leukemia.
The research is published in Leukemia and was conducted by Natasha Kirienko et al.
In previous studies, the team screened some 45,000 compounds. They found eight compounds that targeted energy-producing machinery inside cells called mitochondria.
Dozens to thousands of mitochondria are at work every minute in every living cell, and like all machines, they wear out with use.
In the new study, the team chose these eight of the most promising compounds and conducted tens of thousands of tests to determine how toxic each was to leukemia cells, both when administered individually or in combination with existing chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin.
They found that six of the eight small-molecule compounds were deadly to leukemia cells.
When two or more drugs are given in combination, the researchers can also administer them individually and compare the effectiveness of each regimen.
One currently prescribed drug combination for leukemia—doxorubicin and cytarabine—has a synergy coefficient of 13.
The team’s experiments showed several mitophagy-inducing compounds were significantly more synergistic with doxorubicin. The most synergistic, a compound called PS127B, had a coefficient of 29.
Administering those drugs in combination can kill a considerable amount of cancer cells and still not affect healthy cells.
The team says in the future, they need to better understand how the drugs work in cells.
They need to refine the dose we think would be best, and perhaps most importantly, we need to test on a wide variety of cancers.
They need to know which patients are most likely to benefit from this treatment and which are not.
If you care about cancer, please read studies about a new method to treat cancer effectively, and this low-dose, four-drug combo may block cancer spread.
For more information about cancer prevention, please see recent studies about nutrients in fish that can be a poison for cancer, and results showing this daily vitamin is critical to cancer prevention.
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