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Chemotherapy can become more effective and less harmful to the heart thanks to research conducted at the University of Alberta.
Researchers have long known that the aggressive attack of cancer cells caused by chemotherapy often damages other cells in the body, including the heart, making patients more likely to develop heart problems in the years. to come up.
This prompted Gopinath Sutendra, a professor at the University of Alberta and chair of the translational cardiology oncology board at Alberta Innovates, to look for solutions.
"This is the first targeted treatment at the preclinical level to prevent the side effects of chemotherapy on the heart and simultaneously improve tumor regression," Sutendra said.
Chemotherapy is particularly problematic for the heart because the cells regenerate there more slowly than in other organs, said Sutendra, making the lesions almost irreversible.
While the heart resides in an oxygen-rich environment, a tumor resides in an oxygen-poor environment. The research team at the University of Alberta has therefore thought that this could be a way to target the heart because it contains more proteins that can be modified.
"When (the protein) was labeled with oxygen in the heart, it actually preserved heart function when we treated the heart with chemotherapy agents," Sutendra said.
By stabilizing a metabolic protein in the same way in a lung tumor, the chemotherapy treatment was more effective.
The team used mice for its research on human lung cancer and a common chemotherapy drug in the form of a pill known to cause cardiac dysfunction in patients.
"This protein was preferentially labeled in the heart with respect to the tumor on which it was not labeled by oxygen, which in a way altered the structure of the protein, thus preventing the cardiac dysfunction caused. by chemotherapy, "said Sutendra.
The researchers hope the results will soon be tested during clinical trials with similar protein stabilizing drugs, M2 pyruvate kinase (PKM2), many of which have already been tested in clinical trials involving on other diseases.
"We are talking to pharmaceutical companies that use some of these compounds to cure other diseases," said Sutendra. "There is an interest in testing these in our model as they can then be more easily moved to the clinical trial."
These findings may have similar implications for other forms of heart failure, Sutendra said, which will be the team's next area of study. Following this discovery, the effectiveness of a similar approach in other body organs is another area of potential research.
The study, published on the cover of Science Translational Medicine, was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, and the Alberta Innovates Translational Health Chair in Cardio-Oncology.
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