Feeding cancers softens them up for attack

You would think the worst thing you could do to a cancer patient is to "feed" their tumour. Yet drugs that improve the blood supply to tumours can help hasten their destruction, new research has shown.

The hope is that by giving the drugs to sufferers as a pre-treatment, it will make their cancers more vulnerable to subsequent chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

The strategy has already had some success in patients with pancreatic cancer, and a larger trial is planned now that the mechanism by which it works has been demonstrated in mice.

he drugs work by repairing and improving the quality of blood vessels supplying tumours with blood.

Most tumours have blood supplies that leave parts of the tumour starved of oxygen, or "hypoxic". The vessels are also leaky, stopping chemotherapy drugs penetrating deeply enough to kill the growth. The hypoxic regions also promote the genesis of the most malignant types of cancer cells, as they have to be hardier to survive the suffocating conditions.

This means that tumours well supplied with oxygen are actually more vulnerable to chemo- or radiotherapy, and researchers have for years sought ways to make use of this fact, including putting patients in oxygen chambers.

Now four drugs have been found that have the potential to weaken tumours in as little as three days by improving their oxygen supply.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17545-feeding-cancers-softens-them-up-for-attack.html