| Although there are a number of chemotherapeutic drugs available for the treatment of ovarian cancer, such as taxol and cisplatin, their effectiveness is severely limited by expression of intrinsic resistance in some patients and by acquired resistance in others. There is thus an urgent need to develop innovative methods to try and make these drugs more effective than is currently the case. One such method is to combine them with novel “chemosensitizers”, ie. drugs which will increase the efficacy of the current standard anti-tumor cytotoxic drugs. In this regard, we have been studying the hypothesis that the resistance of ovarian cancer can be expressed at the prototissue/multicellular level, and that this “multicellular resistance” can be minimized or reversed by the appropriate use of so-called “anti-adhesive” agents. In addition, agents that target the cell-extracellular matrix interactions may be employed to target multicellular resistance. Alternatively, another method of targeting mulitcellular drug resistance is to discover novel compounds that, on their own, have the ability to reverse cell adhesion-dependent multicellular drug resistance. These strategies may have a general application in the treatment of many types of cancers that display multicellular drug resistance, and, specifically, may lead to novel treatments for ovarian cancer. |
