What is it about?
Mitochondria are thought to be the site where reactive oxygen species (ROS) are made. These reactive particles, containing oxygen species, can damage or kill cells. Elevated levels of ROS are found is cancer cells. Our preliminary work has shown that treating cancer cells with mitochondria targeted compounds that further increse ROS levels makes the cells more susceptible to attack from conventional chemotherapy agents.
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Why is it important?
Our preliminary results suggest that mitochondria-targeting therapy in conjunction with existing, conventional chemotherapy might be more effective than conventional treatments alone. This means that existing chemotherapy agents could be made more potent and/or lower concentrations of existing chemotherapy agents may be required to achieve the same result. The latter would likely reduce the side effects arising from existing therapies.
Perspectives
The full paper is available open-access from the link.
Dr James R Smith
University of Portsmouth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ROS as a novel indicator to predict anticancer drug efficacy, BMC Cancer, December 2019, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1186/s12885-019-6438-y.
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