A diagnosis of cancer hits hard, at any time of life, but it has been particularly traumatic for families when the patient is a child. Their lives are supposed to be ahead of them.
Ewing sarcoma is a common tumor of the bone or soft tissue that usually targets teenagers and young adults. Now for the first time, researchers at Harvard University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have found a new treatment channel that appears to impair growth and colony formation in Ewing sarcoma cells.
Over the past decade, there have been enormous strides on the clinical side of research on various kinds of cancer, but advanced-stage pediatric tumors have proven extremely hard to treat. Tyrosine kinase inhibition is on the forefront of cancer therapy for adults, but now it appears that a variation has therapeutic applications for arresting the growth of Ewing sarcoma tumors as well.
Researchers were able to trace activated tyrosine kinases in Ewing sarcoma tumor cells using a fluorescent, bead-based biomarker assay based on Luminex’s xMAP® Technology. Luminex is the only flexible and open multiplexing technology that currently enables multiple market leaders to provide research assays for both gene and protein expression.
In the study titled High-Throughput Tyrosine Kinase Activity Profiling Identifies FAK as a Candidate Therapeutic Target in Ewing Sarcoma published in Cancer Research, researchers found that focal adhesion kinase (FAK) was an effective candidate target for treatment of Ewing sarcoma tumors. FAK is a tyrosine kinase critical for cellular adhesion and growth of cancerous cells. By combining the therapeutic effects of a short hairpin RNA with a FAK-selective kinase inhibitor, researchers conclusively demonstrated that they were able to halt the growth of tumorous cells. FAK inhibitors are now in clinical trials for adult malignancies so children suffering from Ewing sarcoma tumors have a new reason to hope for a more effective, and less devastating, treatment on the way.
