- Guys, Take the Lead in Self-Checks for Testicular Cancer
- Re-focusing on Getting Fit? Heart Experts Offer These Tips
- AHA News: Not Just Bad Shoes and Sore Muscles – She Had Peripheral Artery Disease
- Scientists Find Clues to Why AstraZeneca’s Vaccine May Cause Clots
- Stressed, Exhausted: Frontline Workers Faced Big Mental Strain in Pandemic
- Supply of J&J COVID Vaccine to Drop 86 Percent Next Week
- Health Highlights: April 9, 2021
- Nearly Half of U.S. Veterans Cited ‘Personal Growth’ During Pandemic: Survey
- Bright Side: Sunnier Areas Have Lower COVID-19 Death Rates
- Pandemic Has Put Many Clinical Trials on Hold
Scientists ‘Silence’ Aggressive Brain Cancer Gene in Mice

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 30An experimental drug switched off a gene linked to an aggressive and incurable type of brain cancer and extended the lives of mice.
The brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme, kills about 13,000 Americans a year and is the form of the disease that caused Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death in 2009.
The drug used in the study is based on nanotechnology and is small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier to get to brain tumors. It targets and turns off a specific cancer-causing gene in cells. Silencing the gene eliminates proteins that prevent cancer cells from dying.
The mice received the drug via intravenous injection, and lived nearly 20 percent longer and their tumors were three to four times smaller, according to the study, which was published Oct. 30 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“This is a beautiful marriage of a new technology with the genes of a terrible disease,” study senior co-author and nanomedicine expert Chad Mirkin, a professor of chemistry; medicine; chemical and biological engineering; biomedical engineering; and materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, said in a university news release.
Added study senior co-author Alexander Stegh: “Glioblastoma is a very challenging cancer, and most chemo-therapeutic drugs fail in the clinic.”
“The beauty of the gene we silenced in this study is that it plays many different roles in therapy resistance,” said Stegh, an assistant professor in the neurology department at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an investigator at the Northwestern Brain Tumor Institute. “Taking the gene out of the picture should allow conventional therapies to be more effective.”
The next step is to test the drug in clinical trials. Experts note that results achieved in animal studies often don’t translate to humans.
About 16,000 new cases of glioblastoma multiforme are diagnosed in the United States each year. The average survival is 14 to 16 months.
More information
The American Brain Tumor Association has more about glioblastoma tumors.
Source: HealthDay