In more than 90% of cases, the treatment of metastatic cancer suffers a fiasco, and often the reason is that the cancer is resistant to used chemotherapy drugs.
For the treatment of chemotherapy-resistant tumors, oncologists usually use several drugs simultaneously - this is called combination therapy.
One of the most difficult tasks at the same time is to determine which drugs and in what ratio are best suited to a specific patient.
Dr. Dean Ho, professor of oral and medical biology from the School of Dentistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, along with his colleague Dr. Chih-Ming Ho, a professor of mechanical engineering at Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, have developed a truly revolutionary approach that combines traditional medicines and nanotechnology medicines, creating safer and more effective treatments for cancer. The results of their work recently appeared in the journal ACS Nano.
Shi Min-ho with his team created a new powerful tool for overcoming cancer resistance to chemotherapy. It's called Feedback System Control. II ("feedback control system"), or abbreviated as FSC. II. This unique tool allows you to analyze the physical parameters of cells and other biological systems, forming "personal cards" indicating the most effective and safe combinations of drugs and their ratio.
Today, doctors use genetic information to determine the best combinations of drugs and prevent or at least reduce the likelihood of cancer cell mutations. The new technology is not at all dependent on genetic analysis, so therapy can be modified very quickly. If the drug ceases to work because of a mutation, the FSC system. II immediately reveals and recommends a new combination.
"Traditionally, we are simply increasing the doses of chemotherapy drugs. Up to this point, we did not have a systematic method of searching for the optimal combination of drugs, and the number of possible combinations is almost infinite. FSC system. II removes all these issues and allows you to quickly find the best therapy, "- enthusiastically tells about the new technology Dr. Dean Ho.
The researchers demonstrated that the proposed FSC. II combinations of drugs can indeed successfully fight the lines of cells of resistant breast cancer. They used the most common - doxorubicin, mitoxantrone, bleomycin and paclitaxel - among which the system quickly identified ineffective options and excluded them from the treatment regimen.
To increase the effectiveness of combination therapy, the possibility of using nanoclustants (nanodiamonds). Nanoscaleplants are by-products of the extraction and processing processes. They have interesting properties for scientists. In particular, nanofibrillants can firmly bind to molecules of some drugs and transport them to tumor cells.
The use of nanoclusts for this purpose was first proposed by Dean Ho, who worked on the idea at the Laboratory of the Johnson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA and the California NanoSystems Institute,.
"This study will reverse the development of any medicine, nano or non-nano. It's not even about FSC.
II, which now allows you to quickly find the optimal combination of drugs. It's not just about the speed of finding new combinations. This is a systematic method of monitoring and optimizing treatment outcomes, selecting the most effective therapy schemes among possible ones, "says Dean Ho.
Preliminary FSC research. II-optimized drug therapy using nanoclusts showed that this method surpasses in efficiency and safety any other randomly chosen combinations of drugs.
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