Being consistent with good eating habits, drinking those glasses of water, and exercising is supposed to be good for you (I wouldn’t know because I’m unable to do all three of those things consistently). But in melanoma treatment, consistency may not always be a good thing, at least according to recently published research.
Combining various drug treatments has been at the forefront of cancer research for a few years now. But melanoma cells often find ways of developing resistance to these drugs, to the frustration of patients and physicians alike. According to the article, researchers at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health in the U.S. have been tinkering with the schedule of how various drugs are delivered to mice melanoma patients to see if they can improve outcomes.
Using two FDA-approved drugs, the researchers administered MEK inhibitor (used in advanced-stage melanoma) in combination with a CDK4/6 inhibitor called palbociclib, which is used in breast cancer treatments. The scientists discovered that if they gave the mice the drugs intermittently and then stopped, after a week the tumors increased. And after 8 weeks, the tumors developed resistance to the drugs. Not a good thing…
However, and I’m going to quote from the article: “If one drug was provided continuously while the other given intermittently, the tumors shrank and remained small, no matter which drug was continuous.” Further research showed that “a combination of MEK inhibitor given continuously with intermittent CDK4/6 inhibitor was the most effective schedule in mice” without the toxicity levels of the alternate schedule.
Obviously, there needs to be some human clinical trials to see if the result replicates in humans. But since these drugs have already been approved by the FDA, the timescale for those trials might be in years rather than decades. And as we all know, melanoma patients may not have a whole lot of time to wait for bureaucratic red-tape.