Download A new trend in chemotherapy

A new trend in chemotherapy By Angeliki Pournara Nowadays millions of people get diagnosed with cancer and most of them have to go through chemotherapy in order to manage a successful treatment. Even though chemotherapy is one of the leading means to treat cancer, it is also one of the hardest, as the patient may have to go through several chemotherapeutic schemes ending in lots of suffering and a wide range of side effects. Since excluding chemotherapy from the fight against cancer is not possible at the moment, finding a way to make it less painful and more efficient is of high importance. A new automated in vitro viability assay was developed in order to assist chemotherapeutic treatment of patients diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). According to this, a wide range of chemotherapeutic drugs that are used nowadays to treat AML, can be screened for their effectiveness against tumor cells deriving from each patient. The tumor cells can be easily isolated from samples of bone marrow or peripheral blood coming from the patient. A new culture medium has been developed to assist in the assimilation of the environmental conditions inside the human body and thus leading to more reliable results. A new highly automated microscope has also been developed in order to screen the effect of the different drugs in a short time. The assay takes in total 3 days to complete and the results can be directly sent to the clinicians helping in the design of the possibly most effective chemotherapeutic scheme for each patient. This new assay seems to be very promising. It is fast, easy to perform, cheap and can give accurate results. What is more important though, is that it can actually assist in the design of the right chemotherapeutic scheme for each patient, taking into account the individualized traits of the patient’s tumor cells. The drugs that are proved to be more effective can be used as part of the treatment, avoiding thus the use of drugs that would have no effect at all. This new assay promises a more effective and patient-­‐friendly chemotherapy and is expected to be a very important step towards individualized therapy of cancer.