Sydney, Apr 19 (IANS): Researchers have discovered they can overcome chemotherapy resistance in an ovarian cancer subtype by using low doses of a drug which slows cell growth.

In a pre-clinical study, published in the journal Cancers, they found that 2-deoxy-D-glucose, could be used at very low levels to significantly improve the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug, carboplatin, in treating laboratory models of clear cell ovarian cancer.

According to the researchers, ovarian clear cell carcinoma is associated with poor prognosis and resistance to chemotherapy.

"The key finding from our study is that low levels of 2-deoxy-D-glucose markedly improved the efficacy of carboplatin against preclinical models of this ovarian cancer," said study principal investigator John Hooper, Professor at the University of Queensland in Australia.

"Our pre-clinical work used cells taken from patient tumours, so we were very encouraged that we could use such a low dose of 2-deoxy-D-glucose to overcome resistance to chemotherapy in this cancer and stop tumour growth," Hooper added.

This drug has been trialled previously in other cancers, but we were able to use a 10-fold lower dose than previously reported so that it's safer for patients and is less likely to cause side-effects, the researchers said.

The team is hoping to begin trialling the treatment combination in patients within the next 12 months, following the announcement they had received an award to progress the ovarian cancer research.

"Our results thus justify clinical trials to evaluate whether low dose 2-deoxy-D-glucose improves the efficacy of carboplatin in ovarian clear cell carcinoma patients," the researchers noted.