Imatinib could improve radiotherapy treatments

Imatinib could be used to boost radiotherapy treatments for bladder cancer patients, new findings show.

Experts at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford carried out a study with financial support from Cancer Research UK and Yorkshire Cancer Research, which showed that adding imatinib to bladder cancer cells blocks a crucial DNA damage repair route.

Thanks to this, cancer cells are more responsive to radiotherapy, as they are prevented from repairing radiation damage, allowing healthy cells to have alternative survival routes.

Imatinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor that is utilised to treat leukaemias and soft tissue sarcomas.

The specialists demonstrated that the drug stops the RAD51 protein from repairing DNA damage in bladder cancer through the homologous recombination process.

A separate key DNA repair process is defective in aggressive bladder cells, but not in healthy cells, meaning that both repair processes are knocked out in cancer cells, leading to radiotherapy harm being avoided.

The work has indicated that imatinib could make radiotherapy better at killing aggressive bladder cancer cells with a lower number of side effects.

Study author Dr Anne Kiltie, Cancer Research UK scientist at the University of Oxford, said: "These exciting results show that imatinib which is used to treat a range of cancer types may have untapped potential to treat more.

"This is early research in the laboratory so the next stage is to confirm these results in larger studies, with the hope of speeding up the development of better ways to treat bladder cancer – increasing survival with fewer side effects."

Over 10,500 people are diagnosed with bladder cancer every year in Britain, and there are roughly 4,900 deaths every year from the disease.

Dr Julie Sharp, Cancer Research UK’s senior science information manager, noted that the quantitative analysis adds "another piece in the puzzle" when it comes to boosting knowledge of the condition.

Posted by Ben Evans