New Drug Shuts Down Prostate Cancer
A different class of anticancer medication that works by turning off cancer genes appears to effectively halt the progress of prostate cancer development in experimental animals. The new class of anticancer drugs are called histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors. The new medication prevented mice with a precancerous lesion from getting an advanced prostate cancer.
While receiving the new histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor drug, the mice either stopped at a precancerous stage or they developed noncancerous lesions of the prostate called adenomas. A negative side effect of the medication was a reversible decrease in size of the testicles.
When the mice with a high rate of prostate cancer did not receive the drug, almost three fourths of them got cancer. As an added benefit, the drug substantially increased the life span of the mice that received it. The researchers gave the new drug to the animals in their diet.
The histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors shift cancer cell development from its usual aggressive course to a more mild benign direction. Histones are proteins that are believed to control genes by either coiling or uncoiling DNA strands.
