A group of Professor Mototsugu Oie and Takeo Kosaka, a full-time lecturer at Keio University School of Medicine, said that for patients with advanced prostate cancer, the anti-cancer drug will be rewound so that it will be effective again for cancer for which the anti-cancer drug has stopped working. The world's first successful clinical trial of "reprogramming therapy".
In previous studies, the research group confirmed that the combined use of the antiviral drugs ribavirin and docetaxel is effective in cancers for which docetaxel is difficult to respond.The mechanism is thought to be that ribavirin changes a gene that does not work with docetaxel into a gene that works with docetaxel.The pilot clinical trial conducted this time was conducted on 5 patients with advanced prostate cancer who had a very poor course and whose effects diminished after long-term repeated docetaxel therapy.As a result, it was confirmed that the side effects during the administration period were minor and that the tumor marker PSA decreased in 5 of 2 cases.
Ribavirin is a well-established drug that has already been used clinically for patients with hepatitis C.Therefore, it is considered that it can be introduced relatively smoothly, and reprogramming therapy is expected to be a very useful new treatment method.
