New cancer drug could aid thousands

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Cancers such as breast and prostate are often fuelled by sex hormones, including oestrogen or testosterone.

Many patients can benefit from hormone therapies aimed at cutting levels of these hormones, thereby "starving" the cancer and halting tumour growth.

But some people have cancers that are resistant to such treatments while others build up a resistance to the hormone drugs.

Such "hormone-independent" cancer cells are a major challenge to treat and current therapies are limited.

Now a study by researchers at Imperial College London, published in the British Journal of Cancer, has revealed promising results for a new drug, STX140.

It works by directly targeting the hormone-independent cancer cells, causing them to naturally "commit suicide" - a process known as apoptosis.

STX140 starves cancer cells of essential nutrients by stopping the growth of new blood vessels inside the tumours.

Dr Simon Newman, lead author on the paper, said: "We hope that our new drug, STX140, will enter clinical trials so we can test whether this treatment will be effective in humans.

"If the trial results reflect what our lab tests show, we could produce a treatment for cancer patients resistant to hormone therapy, hopefully with fewer side effects than conventional drugs."