Researchers from the Sanford School of Medicine at The University of South Dakota have demonstrated that mifepristone prevents regrowth of ovarian cancer cells that survive standard chemotherapy.

“Utilizing a cell culture system, our work provides evidence that giving mifepristone between courses of cisplatin has the potential to improve treatment success,” said Carlos M. Telleria, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and assistant professor of biomedical sciences at the university.

The regrowth of cancer cells between chemotherapy cycles is a major treatment challenge, Telleria says. One strategy to prevent regrowth is the use of drugs like mifepristone, which has been shown in separate studies to prevent cancer cells from multiplying.

Telleria and colleagues observed whether mifepristone would prevent ovarian cancer regrowth if administered with cisplatin. Ovarian cancer cells in culture were treated with cisplatin at 20 µM for one hour every 12 days for 36 days. Researchers assessed the number and viability of cancer cells, and how likely they were to reproduce, every four days.

Cisplatin killed the majority of cancer cells, but those that remained were able to reproduce. However, when mifepristone was added at a dose of 5, 10 or 20 µM the cells, and their ability to reproduce, decreased.

The larger the dose of mifepristone the stronger the effect; at the 20 µM dose, the cultures contained no cancerous cells to test by day 12 of the study.

Source: American Association for Cancer Research, 2008

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