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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 Avastin alone, or in combination with other treatments, increased levels of the factors VEGF, PlGF and SDF1 alpha, the researchers reported. Patients with higher levels of VEGF and PlGF after Avastin responded better to chemotherapy and radiation, Jain said.
The increase in SDF1 alpha suggests that this factor could be a new drug target to extend the life of patients after other therapies have failed, Jain said. "This is a new drug candidate," he said.
Among the patients receiving Avastin, local control of their disease reached 100 percent, Jain said. "Three-year, progression-free survival was 91 percent," he said.
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Jain cautioned, however, that these results were very preliminary and needed to be confirmed.
In the second study, researchers found that using mifepristone along with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin might improve success in treating ovarian cancer.
"Mifepristone, which was initially created for contraceptive purposes, has a therapeutic effect against ovarian cancers that remained after standard cisplatin therapy," lead researcher Dr. Carlos M. Telleria, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine, said during Tuesday's teleconference.
One of the main problems in treating ovarian cancer is that the usual treatment with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin doesn't kill all the cancer cells. This allows the cells to reform into colonies and the cancer to continue to grow.
"We show for the first time that mifepristone is effective in preventing the re-growth of ovarian cancer cells that survive standard cisplatin chemotherapy," Telleria said.
There are more than 20,000 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year in the United States, and more than 15,000 women die from the disease annually, Telleria noted.
In the study, the researchers exposed ovarian cancer cells to cisplatin. Although cisplatin killed the majority of the cells, there were cells that escaped and regrouped as cancer. This happened all three times the cells were treated with cisplatin over 36 days.
However, when cells were treated with cisplatin and then exposed to mifepristone, none of the cancer cells survived, the researchers found.
"This study suggests that mifepristone has the potential to improve the success of the standard platinum drugs in the treatment of ovarian cancer," Telleria said.
More information
For more on cancer, visit the American Cancer Society.
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