Traditional cancer therapies, such as chemo, are all about finding the middle ground between eradicating neoplastic cells and doing as little harm as possible to the rest of a patient’s normal cells and tissues. But this delicate balancing act is further complicated by the fact that no two patients are exactly alike. This introduces a degree of variability that makes finding the right dose or combination of chemotherapeutics for a given cancer very challenging.
Over at MIT, Michael Hemann and Michael Yaffe have focused their attention on the interplay of two famous proteins associated with a variety of cancers: p53 and ATM. Depending on the expression or lack of expression of these proteins, patients may exhibit significantly different responses to a particular chemotherapeutic regimen. If doctors can assess the expression of these proteins prior to the start of therapy, a regimen could be designed that is unique to each individual patient’s cancer type, enhancing the likelihood of success.
Personalized medicine is very quickly going from buzzword to reality. It is most certainly the future of healthcare.
This work will be presented in the August 15th issue of Genes and Development.
The article can be found here. The authors looked at a variety of human tumors (lung, colon, breast and bladder) which are treated with very different chemotherapy regimes. I would be interested to look at p53 and ATM in a study with a large sample size from a homogenous group of patients, e.g. patients with metastastic bladder cancer that have received no previous chemotherapy. These patients would normally receive cisplatin, a drug that interacts with p53, but is not routinely used for the treatment of colon or breast cancer.
This is a very significant development and could have favorable impact on cancer treatment.
I am however curious to know if the two proteins ATM and p53 have the same role to play in each type of cancer. Every type of cancer has different effect depending on the part of the body where they occur. Couldn’t Interferon also be a possible candidate for such a study.
I hope the scientists come out with encouraging results @15 Aug.