CHEMO BOOST

Cancer research success

RESEARCHERS have discovered a way to turbocharge the effects of an old-fashioned chemotherapy for the most common type of lung cancer, while also preventing collateral damage in the kidneys.

Scientists are hopeful the findings will also reinvigorate the lifespan of other mainstay anti-cancer drugs.

A naturally occurring hormone, which is being trialled for cystic fibrosis patients, has been found as the key to overcoming chemotherapy resistance experienced by about 70 per cent of patients with lung adenocarcinoma — the most common lung cancer in non-smokers.

Using this hormone, called follistatin, scientists from Melbourne’s Hudson Institute of Medical Research and the Garvan Institute in Sydney have been able to flip the odds of treatment success and make tumours disappear in 70 per cent of mice, while also protecting them from kidney damage.

Neil Watkins said while they set out to uncover why most lung cancer patients do not respond to the common chemotherapy drug cisplatin, they had fortuitously found a potential treatment.

“It’s a very exciting finding because it raises the broader idea that we can rethink and give life to old cancer drugs to treat more people and do it safer than we are now,” Professor Watkins said.

Led by Kieren Marini, the researchers knocked out all genes one-by-one in lung cancer cells that were inherently resistant to cisplatin, finding the protein activin was crucial to this resistance and chemoinduced kidney damage.

Knowing that his colleague David de Kretser was working on blocking activin with follistatin, Prof Watkins said this collaboration led to them successfully test the hormone in animal models. The findings were published today in the journal, Science Translational Medicine.

The research team is preparing to start human clinical trials with Prof de Kretser’s start-up drug development company Panata.