Successful new therapy for common type of lung cancer

A combination of already used drugs for lung cancer is considered to be a successful targeted therapy for this disorder, a new study finds. The results were brought based on animal studies. The research is led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists and others. The results of this research are published in the journal Cancer Discovery. The senior author of this study is David Barbie, MD, of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at Dana-Farber and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT who worked on this research in collaboration with co-senior investigator, Kwok-Kin Wong, MD, PhD, of the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at Dana-Farber. “Cytokines play a key role in tumor survival and spread in cells with KRAS mutations”, stated Barbie, “so blocking cytokine signaling can deprive cancer cells of a critical survival strategy. Because the combination of a TBK1 and MEK inhibitor targets two pathways at once, it shuts off cytokine signaling very quickly”.