New Drug Cocktails Hold Promise for Cancer, HIV Treatments

New Drug Cocktails Hold Promise for Cancer Treatments

Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have figured out a way to identify potent, effective drug combinations (also known as cocktails) faster than ever before. Previously, the process was a long and tedious one.

For example, researchers testing six drugs in ten different concentrations would potentially have to go through 1 million combinations before finding the optimum one. “There have always been too many choices and too many combinations to sort through. It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” explained Chih-Ming Ho, the author of the study and UCLA's Ben Rich-Lockheed Martin Professor.

Often times, drugs are much more effective in treating ailments when used in combination with other drugs than they are individually. Some of the most best known drug cocktails are used to fight HIV and AIDS. Nowadays, drug cocktails are also being used to combat other health problems, like cancer.

There are several benefits to using a drug cocktail over an individual drug at a time. “Viruses grow very rapidly and change rapidly as well. Because of that, a virus can become resistant to a particular drug,” said Genhong Cheng, one of Ho's colleagues working on the study. Additionally, in most cases smaller amounts of each drug are needed, sometimes reducing the dosage of each drug by up to 90 percent.

This is where the new closed-loop feedback control scheme comes into play. The results, guided by a stochastic search algorithm, appear in the March 17th Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “With the development of this optimization method, we've overcome a major roadblock,” Ho said.

Pak Wong, a former UCLA student who participated in the study, went into further detail by saying “Basically, the algorithm sees a trend and a direction and drives the trend in that direction. It's like mountain climbing and finding a way to get to the peak. So you keep going, and soon you rapidly find the peak while being guided by a smart search scheme.”

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