|
A drug currently used to treat Parkinson's disease and other illnesses, also might work in patients who living with cancer. The study, which was done in mouse and laboratory models, shows that dopamine could possibly prevent new blood vessels from growing and as a result, slow cancer progression.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates movement and affects behavior. In its synthetic form, dopamine is used to treat heart attack victims, Parkinson's disease and pituitary tumors. But it wasn't known until now that dopamine worked by blocking the growth of new blood vessels (a process called angiogenesis). "Researchers now can test this concept in solid tumors where angiogenesis plays a critical role in the growth and progression of these cancers," says Sujit Basu, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic scientist who conducted this study with Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, Ph.D., a scientist with the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Calcutta, India.; and, Debanjan Chakroborty, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at Mayo Clinic and CNCI. The research is the first report that dopamine has a role in cancer's use of endothelial progenitor cells to provide a supply line of nourishing blood, Dr. Basu says. These cells, a form of stem cells, are released by bone marrow into the blood system in response to the vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A), which is a protein that is secreted by oxygen-deprived any type of cancer cells. The endothelial progenitor cells then help form new blood vessels to feed the cancer.
|