Flowers may hold key to preventing cancer drug resistance
Every year over a million women are diagnosed with breast cancer, and although 80 per cent of those with the condition in the UK survive.
Hundreds of women in the UK do not survive breast cancer because they have developed resistance to breast cancer drugs.
However, experts in the US now claim that flowers may hold the key to preventing women building up resistance to one popular medication known as Tamoxifen.
The drug has been found to prolong survival in many suffers but their bodies often build up a resistance to its anti-cancer properties, however this hurdle can be overcome, according to researchers at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Study lead investigator, Dr Robert Clarke, professor of oncology, physiology and biophysics at the facility, which is part of Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC), said that the new findings show that the flowering plant feverfew may prevent initial or future resistance to the drug.
"A solution to Tamoxifen resistance is sorely needed, and if a strategy like this can work, it would make a difference in our clinical care of breast cancer," he said.
The team at the facility noted that parthenolide, a derivative of feverfew, is currently being tested by other scientists as treatment for a variety of cancers and so the link was already there.
However, the expert said that more research needs to be done before the treatment can become viable, particularly into the link to NF-kB, which is expressed in many of the 45,000 breast cancer patients in the UK.
"We don't know when NF-kB becomes over-expressed in the transformation of tamoxifen-sensitive to tamoxifen-resistant breast cancer cells, and we don't know of other adaptations the cell may have made," Dr Clarke said.
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