Dec 15, 2005

Hormonal Therapy For Lung Cancer?

(Image courtesy of University of Alabama at Birmingham). It is already known that, much like breast tumors, some lung tumors require estrogen to grow. Now a medical student conducting research on a Howard Hughes Medical Institute and colleagues have managed to stop the growth of human lung cancer cells in mice with a class of breast cancer drugs called aromatase inhibitors. Her findings are reported in recent issue of the journal Cancer Research.

"It was a natural progression of the work that had already been done linking estrogen and lung cancer," said Olga Weinberg, who delayed her fourth year at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine to work on the project.

"We followed one of the clues as to why this is happening, namely that estrogen drives the growth of certain types of lung cancer in women." said senior author Richard Pietras, Weinberg's research mentor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"The production of estrogen takes several steps, and aromatase is the key to the process," said Weinberg. "Without aromatase, you don't get estrogen."

To confirm that lung cancer needs aromatase, the team first searched for the enzyme in laboratory-grown lung cancer cells. After finding it there, they also searched 53 non-small cell lung tumor samples from patients Using an antibody specific for aromatase and immunohistochemistry techniques, they found that 88 percent of the specimens from women and 86 percent from men contained high levels of the enzyme.


"Once we saw that aromatase was active, we wanted to see if we could inhibit it with the same drugs they use for breast cancer," said Weinberg. The team treated their cells with the drug anastrozole for 48 hours, finding that it did in fact shut down aromatase activity and retard tumor growth in the lab.

"We found that tumors with both high and low levels of aromatase were sensitive to the drug," said Pietras.

Finally, the team grafted human lung tumors onto mice. One group of mice received anastrozole for 21 days, while a second group did not. The tumors in the mice taking the drug grew 90 percent slower than the tumors in the untreated mice.

Scott      

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Lung cancer
We engage a never-ending daily struggle to understand and defeat the hidden mysteries of cancer. This is a long and laborious fight, but some moments stand out as grim reminders of the severity of the problem and ruthlessness of the enemy. We recently heard about the sad demise of Peter Jennings, who was the news anchor of ABC News for a long time.