Tumors find many ways to evade groundbreaking cancer drug

We still have to do more research to defeat cancer! However, every setback means we learn more about the foe cancer!

"Researchers were ecstatic 2 years ago when, after decades of effort, they devised drugs that could block a tumor-promoting protein in cancer patients called KRAS, which previously seemed impervious to treatment. But many of these KRAS inhibitors—the first of which was approved by U.S. regulators in May ... like other targeted cancer drugs: Most patients’ tumors resumed growing after a few months, as their cancer cells became resistant to the inhibitors ...

Now, a study finds that the roots of this resistance are surprisingly complex, with tumors using an array of escape routes to evade the attack on KRAS.

“There appears to be huge variation” in drug resistance mechanisms ...
... the complexity of KRAS resistance mechanisms suggests researchers may need to try several different drug combinations to overcome the problem—some of these are already in trials ..."

Tumors find many ways to evade groundbreaking cancer drug | Science | AAAS