BOSTON, Sept. 13 -- Combinations of targeted drugs may overcome the agents' often tepid or transitory individual actions against brain tumors, researchers here said.
In laboratory analyses of cell lines from glioblastoma multiforme tumors, three or more receptor tyrosine kinases were usually overactive, according to Ronald DePinho, M.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and colleagues.
Dosing the tumor cells with a single targeted drug - such as Gleevec (imatinib), which inhibits, among other things platelet-derived growth factor -- did little to block their growth, Dr. DePinho and colleagues reported online in Science.
But using three such drugs almost entirely blocked the growth of the cancer cells, the researchers reported.
