� In a landmark study, Medical College of Wisconsin researchers in Milwaukee report that drugs used to inhibit a specific fatty acid in rat brains with glioblastoma-like tumors not solely reduced unexampled blood vessel growth and tumor size dramatically, just also lengthened survival. The study is the featured cover account of the August, 2008 Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism.
"These rat model tumors were highly-developed from human glioblastoma tumour cells and closely mimic human tumors in growth patterns and response to therapy," says lead researcher David Harder, Ph.D., Kohler Co. Professor in Cardiovascular Research. "The concept of targeting blood vessels that feed tumors as an approach to limit neoplasm growth is not a novel approximation," he says. "However, blocking the specific fatty acid described in this study is novel, and holds great promise for use in humans."
Malignant gliomas ar very belligerent tumors of the cardinal nervous system, resistant to chemotherapy and radiation, and account for about half of the 350,000 brain tumors currently diagnosed in the U.S.
Dr. Harder is too professor of physiology, associate dean for research and director of the Medical College's Cardiovascular Research Center. He believes that farther studies, demonstrating that such drugs work in human beings may reveal that higher concentrations or infusions over longer periods of fourth dimension may be more efficacious than the results reported in this study.
"If survival of the fittest time could be protracted, with a combination of surgical therapy and infusion with similar drugs, this could be a pregnant treatment option," he says.
Earlier studies from the Harder lab take in shown that specific roly-poly acids generated in the brain induce new parentage vessel growth known as angiogenesis. Harder and colleagues designed these studies on the premise that all cells, including cancer cells, require oxygen for growth and that blocking formation of specific fatty acids would drop-off blood vessel growth and oxygen render to tumors, retarding their growth.
In their current subject area, Dr. Harder and colleagues compared three sets of rats with induced tumors, two groups using either one of two inhibitor drugs, 17-ODYA or miconazole, to hinder the butterball acid CYP epoxygenase and a control group, receiving a placebo. Drugs were infused forthwith into the tumors over an extended period of time, using specially-designed illumination osmotic pumps and a very minuscule burr hole in the skull. The pumps, similar to those used in humans, were buried just beneath the skin through a midget incision.
Compared to the control group, tumor size in the drug-infused groups was reduced by an ordinary 50 to 70 percent, and survival time increased by phoebe to sevener days, equivalent weight to iII to four-spot months in terms of human survival.
"These pumps have been secondhand in humankind for other diseases and can be designed for delivery of these drugs as well," says Dr. Harder. "We believe they can be used to deliver drugs to close up angiogenesis in complex human tumors such as glioblastomas."
Dr. Harder's co-investigators in this study were Debebe Genremedhin, Ph.D., associate professor of physiology, and Medical College postdoctoral fellows Drazen Zagorac, Ph.D. and Danica Jakovcevic, Ph.D.
Source: Eileen La Susa
Medical College of Wisconsin
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