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FSU CANCER LAB MAY SAVE LIVES
Florida State Times staff report
When cancer is not such a certain killer - some say as soon as five years from now - many of the survivors may owe their lives to researchers on the Florida State campus.
Like other American scientists who are currently creating hope and excitement, FSU biologist Kurt Hofer and his colleagues have, so far, saved only mice.
But they're saving mice from human breast and prostate cancers. They have a patent on the drug they're studying - diamine metronidazole - and they have a contract with pharmaceutical companies to test and develop it for treatment of humans.
"Those cancers that resisted conventional radiation treatment - lung, brain, certain breast cancers and melanoma - have the biggest potential application," Hofer said.
The new drugs are up to 500 times more effective than other drugs in making cancer cells more sensitive to radiation treatment.
An FSU biologist since 1971, Hofer has worked on increasing the potency of radiation, without boosting the danger of side effects, since the 1970s.
He combined the technique of heating cancer cells before irradiating them - proven to be helpful - with the antibiotic Flagyl. The combination increased the effectiveness of radiation by 90 percent, and was tried about 10 years ago on patients in Sweden, South Africa and Great Britain.
But those patients suffered severe damage to their nervous systems, and the Flagyl treatments ended.
In 1994, Hofer teamed up with Li-Xi Yang, just earning a doctorate at Dartmouth Medical School, who had figured out a way to move the drug through a patient's system without harming the nervous system. Yang came to Florida State to work with Hofer, and they developed a drug/radiation combination that cures mice and may work with humans.
Hofer and Yang, who is now at St. Mary's Teaching Hospital in San Francisco, presented their findings to colleagues in the Radiation Research Society in 1997.
If the treatment is shown to be effective in humans, it could become available within five years. The radiation dose required to kill cancers would be reduced by 60 percent to 70 percent, resulting in milder side effects and more survivors.
During the course of the cancer studies, Hofer and Yang found that the
new drug may also be effective against some infectious diseases such as
stomach ulcers and vaginitis, which are also currently undergoing pre-clinical
testing.