Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Ever since discovering a decade ago that a gene altered in lung cancer regulated an enzyme used in therapies against diabetes, Reuben Shaw has wondered if drugs originally designed to treat metabolic diseases could also work against cancer.
The growing evidence that cancer and metabolism are connected, emerging from a number of laboratories around the world over the past 10 years, has further fueled these hopes, though scientists are still working to identify what tumors might be most responsive and which drugs most useful.
Now, in a new study in the journal Cancer Cell, Shaw and a team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that phenformin, a derivative of the widely-used diabetes drug metformin, decreased the size of lung tumors in mice and increased the animals' survival. The findings may give hope to the nearly 30 percent of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors lack LKB1 (also called STK11).
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-01/si-ddc012813.php
The growing evidence that cancer and metabolism are connected, emerging from a number of laboratories around the world over the past 10 years, has further fueled these hopes, though scientists are still working to identify what tumors might be most responsive and which drugs most useful.
Now, in a new study in the journal Cancer Cell, Shaw and a team of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found that phenformin, a derivative of the widely-used diabetes drug metformin, decreased the size of lung tumors in mice and increased the animals' survival. The findings may give hope to the nearly 30 percent of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors lack LKB1 (also called STK11).
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-01/si-ddc012813.php