Keeping cancer out of breath blocks drug resistance

A new combination of existing drugs shows promise that it could reduce the size of cancerous tumors much more effectively than current treatments. As cancer patients know all too well, many highly effective anti-cancer drugs don't stay effective long. Most tumors will become drug resistant over time as their cells rapidly mutate. Chemists from The University of Texas at Austin and Korea University have demonstrated a new approach to blocking cancer-drug resistance that they believe could be applied to any type of cancer. In a dramatic result, the approach which involves chemically combining two existing drugs in a new way produced 50 percent smaller tumors in mice compared with a traditional treatment with the same drugs given separately.