Cancer-fighting therapy shows promise as treatment to speed up wound healing

A type of targeted therapy that has shown promising results treating advanced melanoma could also be used to help speed up how the skin repairs itself from injury, UCLA researchers have found, providing a potential new way to accelerate healing of acute and chronic wounds. In the United States alone, chronic wounds affect more than 6.5 million people and an estimated $50 billion is spent annually treating these conditions. Many areas of medicine — from improving recovery times after surgery to reducing skin-related secondary effects of cancer treatments and other diseases — can benefit from speeding up the skin’s healing process. Aiming to meet this urgent and unmet need, the UCLA researchers investigated a new class of cancer therapy called BRAF inhibitors. These drugs work by blocking a mutated gene in melanoma, which rapidly shrinks the tumor. This can set off a cellular cascade in other skin cells in a process called paradoxical MAPK activation, which can lead to a variety of skin-related side effects, said Dr. Antoni Ribas, director of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Tumor Immunology Program and senior author of the study. “We set out to take advantage of our mechanistic understanding of these drugs and see if we could turn a side effect into a potentially beneficial effect,” Ribas said. “These agents have great potential to be used to develop topical treatments to greatly accelerate wound healing.” The three-year study is published online toda...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news