Not a senescent cell in her cute little body
Folks in
Montreal have just published a paper that has stirred up a lot of
interest. They are suggesting a “one-two”
punch therapy to combat ovarian cancer.
Briefly, they hit it with, I think, standard chemo together with a PARP
inhibitor, and then follow up with something I had never heard of – an anti-senescence
drug. Preliminary results are so good
that they got their paper into a Nature journal,
which can be difficult. Note that they
are still in the cell-line stage; they haven’t even progressed to lab rats, let
alone humans. Under the best of
circumstances it will be a long time until their drugs show up on Rite Aid
shelves!
Did you know
that there are such things as anti-senescence drugs? I sure didn’t. It appears that some cells, when they become
old and useless, live on causing trouble (including cancer) instead of obeying
the order of apoptosis and croaking.
Apparently anti-senescence drugs have been studied, at least partly to
combat aging. If I read these press
releases correctly, the effect of chemo in cancer is to kill cancer cells, yes,
but it also puts some into a state of senescence. Then they administer a regimen of
anti-senescence drugs, possibly killing off all the remaining bad cells.
I hope this
works. It might even be a real
cure. I hope so.
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