New Treatment to cure Uterine Cancer

A new class of experimental cancer drugs could be a potential alternative to standard chemotherapy for women with advanced endometrial or uterine cancer.

Researchers from London's Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) found that drugs known as PARP inhibitors were able to kill off endometrial cancer cells in lab dishes and said their findings should now progress into tests on human patients.

Several large drugmakers, including Abbott, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca, are developing PARP inhibitors, which work by blocking DNA repair mechanisms in cancer cells, stalling the cell cycle and leading to cell death.

AstraZeneca's experimental PARP drug Olaparib and Sanofi's BSI-201 are the furthest ahead in development, and results of Sanofi's drug in breast cancer showed this week that it helped women with an aggressive form of the disease live an average of almost five months longer.

PARP is short for "poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase," which is used by cancer cells to repair DNA damage. By blocking the enzyme, the drug is designed to undermine the ability of cancer cells to heal themselves.

The deletion of a gene called PTEN is key to how PARP inhibitors work and around 80 percent of cases of a common type of cancer of the uterus have this gene mutation.

"PTEN is like a predictive marker for tumors that benefit from PARP inhibition and given that around 80 percent of these cancers have PTEN gene mutation ... it would be very interesting to test this finding in clinical trials."

According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), uterine cancer, which usually occurs after menopause, is the most common type of gynecologic cancer in the United States. This year, it is estimated that more than 43,000 women will be diagnosed with it, and almost 8,000 will die of it.