Getting melanoma chemotherapy to work
By Nathan Seppa
From San Francisco, at the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research
People with the skin cancer called melanoma respond poorly to chemotherapy. Austrian researchers now report that a drug known as G3139 can turn off a gene that underlies this resistance.
This gene, bcl-2, produces a protein that shields tumor cells from chemotherapy by thwarting the programmed cell death, or apoptosis, that these drugs induce in rapidly dividing cells.
G3139 is a mixture of synthesized DNA pieces “that basically glue themselves to RNA and prevent the Bcl-2 protein from being produced,” says clinical pharmacologist Burkhard Jansen of the University of Vienna, who reported the findings.