Thursday, March 13, 2008

Dopamine and Cancer

Dopamine, a drug currently used to treat Parkinson's disease and other illnesses, also might work in cancer patients. Note however, the study was conducted only in animals (a mouse). It is not necessarily a cure all and certainly has not been proven in humans:

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates movement and affects
behavior. In its synthetic form, dopamine is used to treat heart attack victims,
Parkinson's disease and pituitary tumors. But it wasn't known until now that
dopamine worked by blocking the growth of new blood vessels (a process called
angiogenesis).

"Researchers now can test this concept in solid tumors
where angiogenesis plays a critical role in the growth and progression of these
cancers," says Sujit Basu, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic scientist who conducted
this study with Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, Ph.D., a scientist with the
Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Calcutta, India.; and, Debanjan
Chakroborty, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at Mayo Clinic and
CNCI.

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