Drug-resistant cancer responds to personalized drug combinations

Cancer researcher and physician Jeffrey Engelman of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has found a promising way of treating drug-resistant cancer by growing patients’ tumor cells and testing various drug combinations on them to find a way of effective treatment. Engelman and his colleagues devised a way to culture lung cancer cells from patient samples and then test them against a battery of 76 different drugs, and they got encouraging results. According to the researcher, this cell-culture model could make personalized drug screening faster as compared to using a mouse model. However, the team reported that they got unexpected results during their study; for example, cell samples that were resistant to therapies targeting a protein called ALK were felled by different drugs that inhibited another protein called SRC. Further research is required before this treatment can be used for patients.

Read more in Nature.