Combination is key – new treatments for lung and colon cancer?

Researchers from the Experimental Pharmacology and Oncology (EPO) in Berlin-Buch in cooperation with academic partners identified new experimental approaches to treat therapy resistant cancer.

Angriff auf das zelluläre Netzwerk von Krebs

Disruption of the Cellular Tumorigenic Network – A new option for a highly effective therapy in difficult to treat lung cancer patients?

Breaking the crosstalk of the Cellular Tumorigenic Network by low-dose combination therapy in lung cancer patient-derived xenografts by Gürgen et al is available as open access publication in Nature´s Communication Biology.

Breaking the crosstalk of the cellular tumorigenic network: Hypothesis for addressing resistances to targeted therapies in advanced NSCLC by Langhammer and Scheerer is available as open access publication in Oncotarget.

Selecting effective targeted therapy combinations for anti-tumor drug treatment

Today one of the biggest challenges in oncology drug development is the identification of effective targeted therapy combinations that overcome acquired treatment resistance for monotherapies. Therefore a structural process is needed in order to choose optimal drug combination properties that takes as many as possible aspects into account and provides a comprehensive pool of potential options for combination therapies. 

A key aspect of this selection process is the sourcing of bioinformatics data from high-throughput approaches on target expression in patient tumor tissue and expression changes by monotherapy Lead Drug treatment. Such databases exist as open source repositories such as NCBIs GEO Profiles with very limited datasets. In big pharmaceutical companies these databases contain the largest datasets in the world allowing high levels of significance for the identification of over-expressed targets in selected tumor populations, expression changes induced by Lead Drug treatment or e.g. expression changes under hypoxic conditions driving treatment resistance.

The molecular rationale for a targeted therapy multi-drug regimen for NSCLC stage IIIB/IV patients was presented at the 31. German Cancer Congress in Berlin.

Rationale for the design of an oncology trial using a generic targeted therapy multi-drug regimen for NSCLC patients without treatment options by S. Langhammer is available as open access publication in Oncology Reports.