Cancers Best Treated with Multi-Drug Therapies, Harvard Researchers Say

Cancer can be better treated using a two-drug combination, Harvard researchers said.

Currently cancers are treated using one drug. In a latest study paper, Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics with co-author Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, claimed that a two-drug combination could treat certain types of cancers better, especially when the treatment is aimed at interrupting the ailment's growth and spread.

Researchers said that most cancers will develop resistance to the one drug used in single-drug system. However, chances of the cancer developing resistance to two different drugs are low.

"In some sense this is like the mathematics that allows us to calculate how to send a rocket to the moon, but it doesn't tell you how to build a rocket that goes to the moon," Nowak said in a press release. "What we found is that if you have a single point mutation in the genome that can give rise to resistance to both drugs at the same time, the game is over. We need to have combinations such that there is zero overlap between the drugs."

For the study, researchers obtained data from clinicians at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. This data helped researchers understand how patients respond to single drug therapy. They then designed a computer model to predict patients' response to multiple drug treatment. Using the model, they treated virtual patients.

Clinicians currently give just one drug during a targeted therapy, so the latest idea that two drugs, if given together, can eliminate cancer works against the status quo.

"We actually have to work against the status quo somewhat," he said. "But we can show in our model that if you don't give the drugs simultaneously, it guarantees treatment failure."

Cancer is the second most deadly disease that kills half a million Americans each year, the first being heart diseases. CDC statistics from the year 2009 show that as many as 1,555 people die each day of some type of cancer.

According to estimates by the American Cancer Society, about 1,660,290 people will be diagnosed with cancer this year and about 580,350 people will die due to cancer, about 1,600 people a day.

With many pharmaceutical companies exploring many therapies to treat cancer, we may soon have the tools to fight many types of cancers, researchers said.

"One hundred years ago, many people died from bacterial infections, and now they would be cured. Today, many people die from cancer, and we can't help them, but I think once we have these targeted therapies, we will be able to help many people -- maybe not everyone -- but many people," said Nowak.

The study," Evolutionary dynamics of cancer in response to targeted combination therapy," is published in the journal eLife.