Investigation of Dual-Switch Combination Therapy’s Efficacy in Drug Resistant Cancer Cells
Open Access
Author:
Yang, Zeyu
Area of Honors:
Biomedical Engineering
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Justin R Pritchard, Thesis Supervisor Jian Yang, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Drug resistance Suicide gene therapy Combination therapy NSCLC EGFR
Abstract:
Without joining the competition between newly developed target therapy drugs against cancer and acquired resistance for cancer cells, we here address a forward engineering approach that uses the available drugs to create a high dose environment locally in the tumor that solves the drug resistance problem. With proper evolutionary pressure achieved by the target therapy drug, an engineered cell population grows to be the dominating population of a tumor and then self-destructs themselves as well as the surroundings non-discriminatively by turning prodrugs into drugs. In the thesis, three experiments’ results have been shown as evidence supporting the efficacy of the strategy.
