Patients diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer can now benefit from the bone drug zoledronic acid, or at least the following piece of information suggests so. According to Italian experts, zoledronic acid can be used for treating bone metastases in patients with lung cancer and is also useful at an earlier stage of treatment to prevent cancer from spreading. Already known to benefit breast cancer patients, the bone drug appears extremely helpful in the health-space.
Zoledronic acid presumably disallows lung cancer metastases to recruit new blood vessels that are vital for their survival. Such a process of recruiting new blood vessels may be termed as angiogenesis. At the time of the investigation, it was pointed out that zoledronic acid seemingly produces an anti-angiogenic effect in metastatic lung cancer patients. So, this medication can be possibly employed for restricting metastatic lung cancer and in early disease as well. The efficacy of zoledronic acid was tested on 41 patients suffering from advanced lung cancer.
“We found a statistically significant reduction of VEGF levels at day 2 after 4 mg ZA intravenous infusion compared with basal values,” Dr Michela Quirino said. Blood levels of bFGF were also significantly reduced. “Some studies reported that VEGF secretion is induced by bFGF and this could support our results.”
All the study subjects were provided with 4 mg of zoledronic acid and their blood levels for molecular markers of angiogenesis were measured before as well as 48 hours after the injection. These markers probably included the molecules VEGF, PDGF, b-FGF and HGF. No dramatic effect of injecting the drug on the levels of the other two mediators of angiogenesis, PDGF and HGF appeared. Additional investigations can be undertaken to affirm the seeming anti-metastatic effect of zoledronic acid.
It was concluded that the bone drugs can be possibly effective to avoid lung cancer from spreading.