ANTICANCER DRUG SHOWS PROMISE IN RESTORING SENSITIVITY TO CHEMOTHERAPY

Phenoxodiol, an investigational anticancer drug that is being studied by researchers at Yale University, has been shown to restore drug sensitivity in some patients who have shown prior resistance to platinum-based chemotherapy agents. The study, which has been designed to test the ability of phenoxodiol to reverse chemotherapy resistance, was conducted at Yale-New Haven Hospital, in Connecticut and the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.

"Phenoxodiol was developed to overcome this chemical resistance within tumor cells, thereby allowing standard anti-cancer drugs such as cisplatin, carboplatin and paclitaxel to continue to work in this aggressive form of cancer," said Michael Kelly a fellow at Yale University School of Medicine. "What we are seeing with phenoxodiol is an encouragingly high proportion of tumors either shrinking or stabilizing with standard drugs, when we know that the tumor is unlikely to respond to those standard drugs alone."

In the study, 74 percent of patients with late-stage, platinum-resistant tumors who received a combination of phenoxodiol and cisplatin combination showed either tumor shrinkage or no increase in tumor size.