New therapy promises treatment for prostate cancer: researchers

LondonA new gene therapy could potentially treat prostate cancer that causes 300,000 deaths each year worldwide, a new study said after stopping the majority of tumors in laboratory models. The "seek and destroy" gene therapy system has been used against two types of prostate tumors and more than half of them have disappeared over a period of one month.

However, treatment is currently little used because of the lack of delivery systems capable of selectively transmitting genes to tumors without undesirable side effects on healthy tissues.

Nanomedicine "seek and destroy" linked to an iron-bearing protein called lactoferrin was developed and the study focused on two prostate cancer cell lines – PC-3 and DU145.

Intravenous administration of the nanomedicine treatment resulted in the complete disappearance of 70% of the PC-3 tumors and half of the DU145 prostate tumors in one month, revealed the results published in the Drug Delivery magazine.

"While some treatments, including chemotherapy and radiotherapy, may be effective against localized tumors, there is still no effective treatment for patients whose cancer recurs or spreads.

"This means that new therapeutic approaches are urgently needed for these patients," said Christine Dufes, a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. Prostate cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the world.