BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Breast cancer therapy with IL-25

May 5, 2011 7:00 AM UTC

A team of U.S. and Taiwan researchers has shown that IL-25, a proinflammatory cytokine involved in allergic inflammation, also exerts potent cytotoxic effects in breast cancer cells and decreases mammary tumor growth in mice.1 The researchers are licensing the findings to an undisclosed company, and the partners will develop systems for delivering IL-25 or its mimetics directly to tumors.

In 2005, researchers at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the medium in which normal human mammary epithelial cells had been cultured exerted cytotoxic effects on human breast cancer cell lines.2...