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A comment on New drug overcomes resistance in aggressive breast cancers. Parent comment

Re:New drug overcomes resistance in aggressive breast cancers by gus_massa on Sunday October 06, 2019 @09:59AM (#21172054)
I agree. It looks promising but IIUC it is just a new chemotherapy drug. The general idea of killing cells that reproduce is common in many (most?) of the chemotherapy drugs, so they produce nasty side effects like perhaps killing the bone marrow that also have (healthy) cells with a fast preproduction cicle.

I really don't understand the evolutionary/Darwinian spin. It doesn't make sense, it looks like a buzzword. They just (try to) kill all the cells that reproduce like other chemotherapy drugs.

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Re:New drug overcomes resistance in aggressive breast cancers by entee on Sunday October 06, 2019 @11:13AM (#21172527)
There are even DNA and cell division targeted agents. Colchicine kills cells by messing with DNA segregation between dividing cells. This one appears to promote division? Though I haven’t read all the details.
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Re:New drug overcomes resistance in aggressive breast cancers by gus_massa on Sunday October 06, 2019 @12:38PM (#21173070)
I think it doesn't promote cell division directly. IIUC this make the cell during the division to not wait until the chromosomes are correctly split, so the new cell have a high chance of getting a wrong number of chromosome and die. Since the cell doesn't wait until everything is in order, the division is faster.

Form the abstract: https://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/18/10/1696

> In in vivo pharmacodynamic experiments, BOS172722 potently inhibits the spindle assembly checkpoint induced by paclitaxel in human tumor xenograft models of TNBC, [....]

I think the key part is "spindle assembly checkpoint" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_checkpoint

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Re:New drug overcomes resistance in aggressive breast cancers by entee on Sunday October 06, 2019 @09:22PM (#21176493)
Oh interesting. It's basically working in a similar way to Colchicine then. Colchicine blows up the microtubules so the chromosomes don't segregate properly. The combination of the two might be effective, though I suspect there's a toxicity issue or something else I'm missing.
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