Taking breaks from melanoma drugs didn’t slow the growth of patients’ tumors in a clinical trial (here, a malignant melanoma cell within skin tissue).
By Jocelyn KaiserDrugs that home in on and block cell growth signals can dramatically shrink tumors, but all too often the cancer comes back.
An attention-grabbing mouse study 7 years ago suggested that these targeted drugs would work better at shrinking melanoma tumors if cancer patients got a break from their medicine every few weeks.The first large trial to test this idea, however, has found that melanoma tumors grew back faster when patients were on such an “intermittent” dosing schedule.