Radiation therapy is a mixed blessing for cancer patients: It destroys tumor cells but also inflicts harm on healthy tissues, particularly the spleen, bone marrow, and gastrointestinal tract. Researchers at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, report a promising new way to protect those tissues, one they claim could help improve outcomes of radiation therapy, including the mitigation of hair loss during therapy.

Joseph Aronesty is president of WigSalon.com, which has a large client base who wear wigs for various reasons, and often have a very personal interest in cancer therapy. He spoke with Rachel Levine, public relations spokesperson for Cleveland Biolabs, the New York company developing this remarkable technology. "It's very likely that hair loss during radiation and chemotherapy is going to be a thing of the past in about 4-5 years." Though hair loss is the smallest of a patients problems when undergoing cancer therapy, the hair loss occurs because the body is made weak from the therapy. By keeping healthy human cells protected under radiation, but not protecting the cancer cells, it allows for serious cancer treatment mitigating the worry of killing the patient from the therapy, which is often the case nowadays. The happy side-effect is that hair loss does not occur, specifically because the patient's immune system remains strong.

Radiation induces damage in healthy tissues not by directly killing cells but by prompting them to commit suicide through a process called apoptosis. Scientists wondered if they could rescue radiation-blasted tissues by shutting down this cell death program, which the body normally turns on in cells with damaged DNA to keep them from multiplying. Tumor cells persist in the body because they are able to block apoptosis. It's a major reason why they relentlessly continue to mulitply to the detriment of the organism.

Andrei Gudkov, a co-author and a molecular geneticist at Roswell thought," Why not try to do the opposite in normal cells to help them survive radiation? ” Scientists knew that human gut and immune cells activate when flagella, bacteria’s whiplike tails, tickle a cell surface protein called Toll-like receptor 5. Drawing upon this insight, they developed a drug CBLB502, by modifying a small fragment of a Salmonella flagella.

The team found that mice and rhesus monkeys injected with CBLB502 45 minutes to 24 hours before exposure to lethal radiation were more likely to survive, or survive longer, than animals that did not receive the drug. The drug also helped prevent death in mice when administered an hour after the animals received a radiation dose. There were no obvious side effects to the drug, and in another experiment, the researchers showed that radiation was still effective in treating tumors in mice that had received CBLB502.

Based upon research by the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cleveland Biolabs, Dr. Andrei Gudkov, novel proprietary strategies to target the molecular mechanisms controlling apoptotic cell death for therapeutic gain have been developed These strategies exploit naturally occurring differences in the way tumor cells and normal cells respond to DNA-damage-inducing stresses such as radiation. Thus, while normal cells undergo apoptosis in response to radiation, tumor cells die through other non-apoptotic pathways. CBLI's Protectans are compounds that block stress-induced apoptosis in healthy cells. CBLI's Curaxins are small molecules designed to reactivate apoptotic suicide in tumor cells yet have no effect on normal cells. There is a lot of promise in this two-pronged attack on cancer. Their medicine is being tested this summer in cancer patients and healthy humans as well. Those interested in being part of the study group, should contact Cleveland BioLabs, a publicly traded company, (stock ticker: CBLI) at (716) 849-6810.

Cleveland BioLabs, a Buffalo, New York, company that owns the drug, views CBLB502 as an adjuvant to radiotherapy, but also hopes to sell it to governments as a preventive medicine to be stockpiled for a nuclear war, dirty bomb, or nuclear accident.

Cleveland BioLabs Inc. 73 High St. Buffalo, NY 14203 Phone: (716) 849-6810

WigSalon presented this presentation solely for the education of it's clients. There's nothing for WigSalon to sell from Cleveland Biolabs, and it is not associated with the company. WigSalon found out about Cleveland Biolabs because it is in the wig business; but we are sharing this information because it holds hope for all people, it certainly seemed pertinent to us, and we thought you might like to know.

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