Australian scientists have discovered a set of drugs that stop the growth of bowel cancers in about 80 to 90 per cent of cases.
Dr Toby Phesse, from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, said new forms of treatment for this type of cancer are in high demand.
“About 4,000 people are going to die of [bowel] cancer every year in Australia, and so we’re really crying out for new therapies to try and target this disease,” Dr Phesse said.
“And our lab is specifically looking for targeted strategies to try and work out which signalling pathways or which genes could be targeted to try and prevent this cancer.”
Dr Phesse said the team of researchers found a particular kind of drug called JAK inhibitors that can be used to target colon cancers.
“This particular pathway is regulated in many types of cancer, including colon cancer, and we found that 80 per cent of colon cancers have got a certain mutation in the weak pathway,” he said.
“However, this pathway is also required for the normal cells of the intestine and so if you try and target that pathway directly, you pose a severe threat of actually affecting the normal cells of the intestine.
“So we wanted to try a different strategy and try and target a parallel pathway and that is what brought us to the JAK pathway.
“And we found that with the JAK inhibitors these tumours, 80 per cent of them, they were exquisitely sensitive to JAK inhibitors.”
The drugs work in two ways: by stopping cell growth and, in pre-chemical models, preventing the development of new tumours.
“So this will be important for people who have got a familial condition in which they develop multiple intestinal tumours,” Dr Phesse said.
“It’s very exciting and it really opens the window now to use these drugs.”
With JAK inhibitors already approved for use in other diseases, Dr Phesse expects the up-take of this new bowel cancer treatment to be quick.
“The great thing is that they are already existing in the clinic and they’re being used to treat disorders such as psoriasis, arthritis, minor fibrosis,” he said.
“So we don’t have to spend the many years and the resources … to develop a new drug.
“They’re there in the clinic and we just have to bring the story out now that these drugs actually can be used in colon cancer.”