Explanation for side effect in people could provide way to avoid it
By Meghan Rosen
Web edition: May 29, 2013
In a false-color image, pericytes (green, top) wrap around tiny blood vessels (colored red) in a mouse heart, sealing up leaks. Treatment with the cancer drug sunitinib wipes out pericytes in the mouse heart (bottom).
Credit: Courtesy of Science Translational Medicine/AAAS
Heart damage from chemotherapy may be due to leaky pipes. Sunitinib, a cancer drug known to harm heart tissue, wipes out cells that seal blood vessels, Vishnu Chintalgattu of the biotech company Amgen and colleagues report May 29 in Science Translational Medicine.
These cells, called pericytes, normally wind around tiny blood vessels, or microvessels, keeping them healthy and plugging leaks like rubber patches glued to bicycle inner tubes.
Researchers examined tissue from drug-treated and untreated mice and noticed that sunitinib stripped pericytes from microvessels in the heart. Without the sheaths of sticky cells, more than twice as much fluid seeped from the microvessels.
Leaking liquid may explain why as many as 28 percent of sunitinib-treated cancer patients end up with heart trouble, the researchers suggest.
But there may be a way to fix the plumbing problem. Thalidomide, the molecule made famous for causing birth defects and now used to treat cancer, can protect pericytes from slaughter by sunitinib, the team reports.
Dosing lab-grown pericytes with only sunitinib killed the cells, but giving them both drugs didn?t seem to do any harm. And when researchers grafted human cancer tissue into mice and treated them with the two drugs, the animals? tumors shrank and their hearts pumped normally.
Suggested Reading
R. Ehrenberg. Guards of the blood-brain barrier identified. Science News Online, October 13, 2010. [Go to]
L. Biel. Reviving a tired heart. Science News. Vol. 180, October 22, 2011, p. 26. Available online: [Go to]
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