Lodamin - new hope for cancer patients

An improved drug brings hope to cancer patients. This is exciting news. The drug is called lodamin.

Can lodamin overcome cancer successfully? Well, it did — in mice! So far.

Experiments using mice showed that lodamin worked against various types of cancer, viz. breast cancer, prostate cancer, brain tumors known as glioblastomas and uterine tumors. It also stopped the growth and spread of so-called primary tumors.

Researchers found that lodamin appeared to be able to fight liver cancer effectively in mice. Mice were given oral administration of lodamin, and it first reached the liver, thus efficiently preventing liver metastasis from developing in mice. This is encouraging because, according to researchers, liver metastasis is very common in many tumor types, and fatal most of the time. The livers of the treated mice were found to be almost clean.

Mice treated with lodamin had normal-looking livers and spleens, while all untreated mice had fluid in the abdominal cavity, and enlarged livers covered with tumors.

“20 days after being injected with cancer cells, 4 out of 7 untreated mice had died, while all treated mice were still alive,” Ofra Benny of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School and colleagues reported.

How was lodamin discovered? Is it a new drug?

This drug was experimentally known as TNP-470, developed by Harvard’s Donald Ingber and Dr Judah Folkman (a cancer researcher who died in January). It was originally isolated from a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus fresenius.

This fungus was discovered accidentally by Ingber while he was experimenting with growing endothelial cells (the cells that line blood vessels). The mold affected the cells in a way that prevented capillaries (tiny blood vessels) from growing.

TNP-470, now called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Folkman who pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy, ie starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.

Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman’s team has been working to perfect for 20 years. His colleagues reported in the Nature Biotechnology journal that they had developed a formulation that worked as a pill without side-effects.

SynDexRx, Inc, a privately held Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company, has licensed the drug.

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Tags: brain tumors, breast cancer, cancer, glioblastomas, nanotechnology, prostate cancer, syndevrx, TNP-470, uterine tumors

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