Modified interferon and paclitaxel partner to hammer ovarian cancers.

2002 AUG 15 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - Researchers think that combining pegylated interferon with paclitaxel may be useful for treating one of the most menacing forms of gynecological cancers, ovarian cancer.

Because there are no highly sensitive tests for ovarian cancer, it is often detected at later stages, when it becomes more difficult if not impossible to treat. Using female mouse models of implanted human ovarian cancer, researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, have devised a new combination therapy that may eventually prove fruitful for treating such cancers in women.

For the study, Sean Tedjarati and colleagues injected pegylated interferon (PEG-IFN), paclitaxel, or a combination of both into experimental mice 7 days after they had been implanted with SKOV3ip1 ovarian cancer cells. Investigators treated each of the mice for 4 weeks.

An initial study showed that PEG-IFN alone at a dose of 7000 units was sufficient for reducing tumor size. Much larger doses yielded no additional benefits, according to Tedjarati and coauthors.

They also found that when PEG-IFN and paclitaxel monotherapies were compared with the combination therapy, the 7000 unit dose of PEG-IFN worked in concert with paclitaxel to more effectively diminish tumor vascularity and proliferation. Laboratory analysis showed the ...