Two-Drug Combination May Eliminate Cancers: New Plan of Attack

Scientists continue search for new ways to treat cancer, creating new drugs and therapies that will hopefully lead to better treatments. Now, though, researchers have developed a "targeted therapy" treatment with a two-drug combination. In theory, this new treatment could interrupt cancer's ability to grow and spread, which means that it's applicable to nearly all cancers.

In earlier studies, the researchers showed the importance of using multiple drugs. While single-drug therapies are temporarily effective, the scientists found that ultimately, they'll fail because the disease eventually develops resistance to the treatment. That's in stark contrast to multiple drug therapies that can attack cancers and prevent them from building up an immunity to the treatments.

"In some sense this is like the mathematics that allows us to calculate how to send a rocket to the moon, but it doesn't tell you how to build a rocket that goes to the moon," said Martin Nowak, one of the researchers, in a news release. "What we found is that if you have a single point mutation in the genome that can give rise to resistance to both drugs at the same time, the game is over. We need to have combinations such that there is zero overlap between the drugs."

In order to test the two-drug combination, researchers turned to an expansive data set supplied by clinicians that showed how patients respond to single-drug therapy. They then created computer models of how multidrug treatments would work. Using this new model, they treated a series of "virtual patients" to see how the disease would react to the multidrug therapy.

"You would expect to cure most patients with a two-drug combination," said Ivana Bozic, co-author of the new paper, in a news release. "In patients with a particularly large disease burden you might want to use a three-drug combination, but you would cure most with two drugs."

The findings reveal that two drugs administered at the same time could help treat and even cure cancers. Currently, though, the scientists need to actually make the drugs. In order to create drugs that are not vulnerable to the same mutation, researchers need to develop new strategies, such as using different drugs to target different pathways in cancer's development.

The findings are published in the journal eLife.