Biography
Biography: Moses SS Chow
Abstract
Development of treatment strategies for resistant cancer with Chinese medicine, and prostate cancer as an example. Despite the availability of many potent anticancer drugs that can target cancer cells, great majority will acquired resistance during use, thus rendering treatment ineffective. It is well known that multiple cellular mechanisms of resistance can occur, such as decrease drug uptake, alteration of metabolism, increase efflux, modification of target, enhanced DNA repair, inactivation of apoptotic proteins and in activation of anti-apoptotic proteins. Treatment strategy of overcoming one specific mechanism of resistance at a time by the use of single compounds, e.g. inhibitors of Pgp responsible of anticancer drug efflux, has not been proven effective clinically. The reason is likely due to co-expression of other mechanisms of resistance. Thus a strategy of using herbs that contain multiple active components may be able to more effectively overcome chemo resistance by targeting multiple mechanisms. Specific examples of herbal extracts that can induce chemo sensitizing effect of the anticancer drug in resistant prostate cancer cells will be presented, based on in vitro and in vivo (xenograft model) experiments
