PHILADELPHIA – Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine identified a combination therapy as a way to sensitize resistant human cancer cells to a treatment currently being tested in clinical trials They propose that the therapy may help to selectively eliminate cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact, providing a cancer treatment with fewer side effectsterm. The Penn team reports their findings in the July issue of Cancer Cell.

To test the ability of the combined therapy in treating cancerous tumors, senior author Wafik S. El-Deiry, MD, PhD, and colleagues administered TRAIL, a tumor necrosis factor, and sorafenibterm, an inhibitor currently used to treat renal cancer, to mice  with colon carcinomas. The sorafenib and TRAIL therapy reduced the size of tumors in mice with few side effects, demonstrating the potential effectiveness of the combined treatment on human colon cancers.