In addition to Burkitt's lymphoma, such a therapy might be applied against many types of lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer. The next step, Dr. Wickstrom says, is to test the therapy in humans. My clinical colleagues here at Jefferson would like to test this therapy in a small group of patients. We've asked the National Cancer Institute for assistance with that trial. Their results appear in the August issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute .
Antisense therapy aims to turn off the mutated genes that cause cancer.
In contrast to the shotgun approach of chemotherapy, which kills both normal and cancerous cells, antisense attacks the cause of cancer. When the genes are turned off, they can no longer make the protein products that lead to disease. Antisense DNA drugs work by binding to RNA messages from disease genes, so that the genetic code in the RNA cannot be read. The RNA message copied from a gene carries the genetic code for a specific protein, which is called the sense orientation. The complementary strand in a double helix is called antisense .