Getting melanoma chemotherapy to work

From San Francisco, at the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research

People with the skin cancer called melanoma respond poorly to chemotherapy. Austrian researchers now report that a drug known as G3139 can turn off a gene that underlies this resistance.

This gene, bcl-2, produces a protein that shields tumor cells from chemotherapy by thwarting the programmed cell death, or apoptosis, that these drugs induce in rapidly dividing cells.