There are a number of mysteries in medical science regarding why drugs sometimes work and sometimes don’t. One of those mysteries is, why a number of drugs that work well on certain lung and blood cancers do not appear to be effective at all on some patients. Trying to understand why this is the case is a lengthy process, as it needs to be established what the specific cause of the problem is. However, now a team of researchers from Singapore appear to have come up with the answer.
It appears that the culprit is a gene variation which is present in about 15 percent of Asians. Interestingly, however, it does not surface at all in Caucasians and Africans. Now that the problem has been identified, the authors were able to suggest a potential way to overcome the issue, which involved adding another drug to the mix. This solution has worked very well in the testing environment and it is hoped that it will be equally successful in human patients.
Cancer drugs are extremely expensive and if they are ineffective it can waste not only a lot of money but also time, which can be just as valuable when trying to fight the condition. Thankfully the researchers were able to figure out how the gene variant caused resistance to the cancer drug, and then found another drug that was able to restore the treatment’s ability to kill cancer cells.
Even if the new course of treatment turns out to ineffective in human subjects, the important factor of the research will still stand which has ensured that we now understand why certain cancer drugs to do not work in Asians in that same way that they do for other races.
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