New Cancer Tumor Treatment

Experts have found a way to repair a defective gene that encourages cancer and to make it kill off tumors, a Swedish scientist said Friday.

More than half of all cancer tumors have a mutated gene called p53. In a healthy state the gene helps repair the DNA damage that leads to cancer in the first place. Without that function, tumors may grow uncontrollably.

But a research team at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm has succeeded in repairing the gene, paving the way for a drug to combat virtually any form of the disease, the group's head, oncology professor Klas Wiman, said.

"We were lucky enough to find a substance that worked. It repairs the mutated proteins in p53 and the cancer then basically kills itself," Wiman told Reuters.

His team tested the substance, a molecule called Prime-1, on mice grafted with human cancer of the skeleton.

Shortly after the mice were injected with it, tumor growth stopped more or less entirely, Wiman said. No side effects, such as weight loss or unusual behavior, were spotted.

"We have tried it in cell cultures, and as long as there is defective p53 the substance seems to work," Wiman said.

Since not all cancer patients carry the defective gene, Wiman said the substance should be used in combined cancer treatments, using both radiation and medicine.

"It's always an advantage to attack the cancer from several fronts at the same time," he said.

The next step in developing the discovery will be understanding exactly what Prime-1 does.

"We actually don't know how it works. We want to find similar substances that could work even better and try to understand the mechanism behind Prime-1," Wiman said.

Bringing a drug to market was still a long way off, he added. "Looking at drug development it would take around 10 years before it's ready."

The results of Wiman's research were published in the March issue of the science magazine Nature Medicine.

By Daniel Frykholm