Could the destroyer of wrinkles also work on cancer? Gastric cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the world and can be hard to treat. Chemotherapy is often not enough to stop tumour growth, but it seems that botox injections could help.
One method for treating stomach cancer is to sever the branches of the vagus nerve that innervate the stomach, a procedure known as a vagotomy. That's because the nervous system influences how certain cells behave, in some cases encouraging tumour growth But a vagotomy is a very invasive procedure.
Timothy Wang of Columbia University, New York, and his colleagues wondered whether the same effect could be achieved with a drug.
Lethal toxin
One way nerves are thought to stimulate cancer is through the release of signalling chemicals. To prevent nerve fibres from doing this, Wang's team used botox, the lethal botulinum toxin produced by the Clostridium botulinum bacterium, which is sometimes injected to prevent wrinkles. Botox enters the nerve cells and prevents them from releasing the signalling chemicals that can influence tumour growth.
The team injected botox into mice with gastric cancer and compared their tumour growth with that in mice that had received a vagotomy. They found that the botox was as effective at limiting tumour growth as surgery when used in early stages of the disease.
For advanced gastric cancer, botox cannot reduce the size of tumours that have already developed. It can, however, stop new growths from increasing in size, so the team tried combining botox treatment with chemotherapy. While botox and chemotherapy on their own had little effect on new tumours, mice that received both treatments had tumours that were about half the size of those that received no treatment at all.
Prolonged survival
"In a patient with an advanced stage disease that you don't want to do surgery on, you could use botox in combination with chemotherapy. The injections may help control the growth of further tumours, and allow for prolonged survival," says Wang.
This new research offers a novel treatment for gastric cancer, says Michael Khan of the University of Southern California's Norris Comprehensive Cancer. "Unfortunately, gastric cancer is not particularly sensitive to chemotherapy," he says. He suggests that combining it with botox treatments could be an effective approach.
Wang's team next plans to test the use of botox in advanced gastric cancer patients who have shown resistance to chemotherapy.
Journal reference: : Science Translational Medicine, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3009569
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