An Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation scientist is working to prevent some cancers from becoming resistant to drugs such as those used in chemotherapy.

Amit Maiti said his lab work is showing promise in killing ovarian cancer cells and also could be effective in treating other forms of cancer.

“When we use drugs to kill cancer, we almost never kill all of it,” Maiti said. “And when the cancer comes back, it’s resistant to the drug, which makes it harder to kill.”

Maiti has identified genes that could be manipulated to keep cancer cells from surviving drug treatment.

When cells in our bodies produce energy, they create reactive oxygen species, or ROS. Cancer cells, which grow continuously, have higher levels of these byproducts. When anti-cancer drugs are used, the level of byproducts in those cells decreases, and the cells become drug-resistant.

Maiti suspected that if he could keep ROS levels high in cancer cells, they might not become drug-resistant.

So in a lab culture, he took drug-resistant ovarian cancer cells and treated them with an anti-cancer drug and a small dose of ROS.

“It killed them all, 100 percent,” he said. “So we know that by increasing ROS levels in drug-resistant cancer cells, we make them vulnerable to drugs again.”

In humans and animals, it’s hard to inject ROS into cells without destroying the cells. Maiti is looking at ways to alter gene function that would achieve the same results.

The next step will be testing the approach in laboratory mice. Maiti described his work in the online edition of Pharmacogenomics Journal.