Magnetic Nanoparticles Show Promise For Combating Human Cancer

Scientists at Georgia Tech and the Ovarian Cancer Institute have further developed a potential new treatment against cancer that uses magnetic nanoparticles to attach to cancer cells, removing them from the body. The treatment, tested in mice in 2008, has now been tested using samples from human cancer patients. The results appear online in the journal Nanomedicine.

“We are primarily interested in developing an effective method to reduce the spread of ovarian cancer cells to other organs ,” said John McDonald, professor at the the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute.

The idea came to the research team from the work of Ken Scarberry, then a Ph.D. student at Tech. Scarberry originally conceived of the idea as a means of extracting viruses and virally infected cells. At his advisor’s suggestion Scarberry began looking at how the system could work with cancer cells.

He published his first paper on the subject in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in July 2008. In that paper he and McDonald showed that by giving the cancer cells of the mice a fluorescent green tag and staining the magnetic nanoparticles red, they were able to apply a magnet and move the green cancer cells to the abdominal region. Read more

Everolimus Shows Potential In Tough-to-Treat Gastric Cancer

ORLANDO – Everolimus monotherapy shows promising activity and is generally well tolerated in patients with metastatic gastric cancer who have undergone prior anticancer therapy, according to phase 2 results reported by Japanese researchers at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s 2010 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium (ASCO GI).

Hiroya Takiuchi, MD, with Osaka Medical College, presented results in 53 patients with metastatic gastric cancer who received a daily 10 mg dose oral everolimus. All patients had failed up to two prior chemotherapy regimens.

Everolimus is an oral inhibitor of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) that has demonstrated anticancer activity in preclinical cellular and animal models and also in patients with advanced gastric cancer.

“Because of poor long-term outcomes with surgery and standard chemotherapy management of advanced gastric cancer, it is important to study new targeted agents in this population,” Dr. Takiuchi said.

Oral everolimus was administered in continuous 28-day cycles until the patient developed progressive disease or unacceptable toxicity or elected to withdraw from the study for any other reason, with a dose reduction permitted for tolerability.

The primary study endpoint was disease control rate (DCR), defined as the proportion of patients with complete response, partial response or stable disease as the best overall response. Read more