Early diagnosis is crucial to the successful treatment of cancer largely due to the sparsity of effective therapeutic options for metastatic cancer. This field will hopefully expand in the future and early signs are promising with a number of candidate therapeutic targets having already been developed (Click here for free access to our recent dossier "Novel strategies for preventing metastasis"). Cancer of the prostate is one particular type of cancer that could most benefit from anti-metastatic treatment. Accounting for over 35% of cancers prostate cancer is associated with low rate of progression and mortality while confined to the prostate. Indeed watchful waiting is one of the common clinical approaches to this disease. Once the tumor has escaped the prostate however, the situation becomes very much different since metastatic prostate cancer is currently incurable. Consequently, prostate cancer accounts for 40,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Chemotherapy forms the mainstay of cancer treatment, with antibiotic forms of tetracycline representing a major class of chemotherapy. However, their low in vivo efficacy and associated morbidity precludes the use of anti-cancer antibiotics in some major types of cancers such as prostate cancer. As a result, considerable effort is currently focused on improving the therapeutic profile of this class of drug allowing it's fuller exploitation. In fact, almost 30 antibiotic related anticancer drugs are reported as being in preclinical or early clinical stages of development. Collaganex Pharmaceuticals have been developing more specific derivatives of tetracycline with reduced toxicity and have recently reported one such molecule, CMT-3, which was able to induce apoptosis, necrosis and cell cycle arrest in prostate cancer cells. Perhaps of even greater interest was the ability of CMT-3 to reduce the invasive potential of cancer cells. This was related to a decreased secretion of MMP-2, TIMP-1 and TIMP-2. As predicted this molecule was able to block tumor growth and metastasis in an animal models of prostate cancer. Recently concluded phase I trials suggest that CMT-1 is able to induce long-term tumor stabilization in certain cancers with few serious side-effects. These data suggest a potential use of CMT-3 as an oral, nontoxic drug to treat metastatic prostate and other cancers

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