Predicting which cancer drugs will be most effective for specific patients is as much an art as a science. But Boston researchers have devised a new technique that can quickly predict which chemotherapy drugs are likely to work best for certain types of tumors.
The new technique, developed at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, is called Dynamic BH3 Profiling (DBP) and in most cases provides results within 16 hours,
Fox News reports.
The method works by detecting the earliest signs that a tumor is “self-destructing” — a process known as apoptosis — in response to treatment with a particular drug.
“This measurement can be made in less than a day. It turns out that those drugs that push cancer cells closer to the threshold of apoptosis even over this short time frame are the drugs that eventually kill the cancer cell best, both in the laboratory, and in mice and even humans,” researcher Anthony Letai, M.D., told Fox News.
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