November is recognized as Lung Cancer Awareness Month all over the world. New and advanced researches continue to work in the arena of lung cancer treatment. The University of Barcelona and Hospital Clinic de Barcelona has collaborated with Boehringer Ingelheim Inc. with the purpose of improving efficiency of Nintedanib, an anti-angieogenic and anti-fibrotic drug for lung cancer treatment. This collaboration enabled researchers to identify molecular mechanisms underlying lack of efficiency of this drug in non-small cell lung cancer. The results were published in Journal Cancer Research and could have implications in design of new therapeutic strategies to expand clinical benefits of the drug.
Nintedanib drug is developed by Boehringer Ingelheim and it showed therapeutic benefits in patients suffering from advanced lung adenocarcinoma. Its action mechanism is based on inhibition of receptors involved in formation of new vessels and fibrosis.
Jordi Alcaraz, researcher at CIBERES says, “The results describe for the first time that tumor fibrosis is higher in adecarcinoma than in squamous cell carcinoma, which causes patients with adenocarcinoma to respond better to treatment with nintedanib. Furthermore, we identify the underlying mechanism: the pro-fibrotic transcription factor SMAD3 in fibroblasts- the main cells that drive fibrosis- is more epigenetically repressed in squamous cell carcinoma than in adenocarcinoma, and this makes patients with squamous cell carcinoma to have less fibrosis and to be resistant to nintedanib.”
The results of the study could have further implications in design of therapeutical strategies to treat lung cancer with different drug combinations. The results published in Journal Cancer Research, help to expand the clinical benefits of the drug to large spectra of lung cancer patients. This study also identified the role of smoking in the lack of efficiency of drugs against this deadly disease.
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