New view of leukemia cells identifies best treatment options, Stanford resea...( evere. But Nolan and Irish found that m...)

A major difference between people who did and did not respond to chemotherapy was the way in which their cells responded to environmental signals. The cells that handed messages down the wrong set of pathways were able to avert the normal cell-death signals triggered by chemotherapy.

Learning to recognize the pathways most commonly disrupted in aggressive cancers could help researchers predict which patients won't respond to standard chemotherapy. Doctors could immediately propose that the person consider less common therapies.

"This is the first time we've been able to look at cancer signaling messages in a population of individual cells to distinguish treatment options," Nolan said. What's surprising is that the equipment was around for decades before Perez and then Irish honed the new technique. Nolan said flow cytometry machines are widely available to doctors treating AML and other cancers, making the technique practical and helpful to doctors.

In follow-up experiments Nolan hopes to correlate the patterns in the note-passing network to how well the patients responded to different forms of chemotherapy and how long their remission lasted. Armed with that information, doctors can help patients get the best treatment for their disease sooner.

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22-Jul-2004