| Abstract |
People are getting older. Increased life expectancy puts diseases such as
cancer in the foreground. A particularly aggressive and malignant form is
pancreatic carcinoma, in which tens of thousands of people die every year
in industrialized countries despite the most intensive treatment. Current
tumor therapies such as resection, radiation, chemotherapy and
combinations thereof do not or only to a very limited extent. The mean
survival rate for the first year is 20% and only 1% of the patients
survive the 5th year after diagnosis. Without treatment, death occurs on
average 3-6 months after diagnosis. Especially the almost inauspicious
prognosis and the bad treatability let research oncologists worldwide for
new therapies. One approach to this is the 'starvation' of cancer cells.
Due to the enormous iron requirement of proliferating cells, it seems
reasonable to suppose that by reducing iron uptake into the cell, it can
cause it to shrink. Exactly this approach is described in the present
work. Both in vitro and in vivo, it was tested whether one can achieve a
positive effect by an antibody therapy against the transferrin receptor,
which infiltrates iron into the cell.
|
|---|
