Two drugs together kill small cell lung cancer in the laboratory

A Duke team paired asciminib, a leukemia drug that the FDA has approved, with an experimental ATR inhibitor. Low doses of the two together killed metastatic small cell lung cancer cells far better than either drug alone. The team saw the result in cell lines and in mice, and Cell Reports carried the study.

Asciminib drives the replication machinery into the transcription machinery at R-loops, and those collisions break the DNA. An ATR inhibitor then removes the repair that the cancer cell needs to survive the breaks. Dr. Li Lan and Dr. Lee Zou brought the R-loop and DNA repair work to the study of Dr. Ann Marie Pendergast, and a student of the Pendergast lab learned the imaging method in their two labs.

About seven in ten patients already carry metastatic disease when a doctor finds this cancer, and about seven in one hundred live five years. In July Dr. Pendergast and Dr. Lan took a five-year grant of the National Institutes of Health to follow the mechanism further.

Read the announcement of the Duke University School of Medicine.