Predicting cancer cells’ response to chemotherapy
Many chemotherapy drugs work by damaging cancer cells’ DNA so severely that the cells are forced to commit cellular suicide. However, these drugs don’t work for all patients: If cells can repair the DNA damage, they may survive treatment. MIT researchers have now developed a way to test cells’ ability to perform several different types of DNA repair, and to use that information to predict how tumors will respond to a particular drug. In a paper published in the journal Cancer Research, the researchers successfully predicted how difficult-to-treat brain tumors would respond to the first-line chemotherapy drug used in such cases. They made these predictions by analyzing four different DNA repair pathways in human tumor samples grown in mice. “Improving predictions is important because we want to get the right drug to the right patient. We also don’t want to treat people with a drug that’s not going to work. There are a...