it is also best known as neoral

products containing  cyclosporine:
sandimmune, cicloral, gengraf, restasis, atopica, optimmune

ciclosporin, cyclosporin, cyclosporin a

Therapy

Immunotherapy, in which the body's immune system is altered to combat disease, is a hot area in cancer research and treatment. A recent study reports research with mice that holds promise for treating bladder cancer in humans.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, studied a protein called ras that's involved in turning normal cells into cancer cells. Using mice with bladder cancer, the researchers wanted to see if they could use part of this gene to immunize the animals and slow down the growth of cancer cells.

First the researchers had to figure out where the mutated protein was located, so they analyzed the three types of ras genes. Once they found it, they synthesized a new form of this protein to immunize mice with bladder cancer and looked to see what happened to the animals' immune systems.

When the researchers took white blood cells from the spleens of immunized mice and compared them to cells from control mice who also had bladder cancer, they found that the immunized cells responded to the new protein by rapidly reproducing, indicating that they were mobilizing to fight the cancer-causing protein. They also produced lots of cytokines, proteins that are involved in the immune response.

Live mice that had been immunized with the new protein were studied in three separate experiments. In each one, immunized mice who were "challenged" with the mutated protein showed slower tumor growth and improved survival. Mice infected with proteins that cause other types of cancer just died, which means that the cells used for immunizing the mice worked specifically on bladder cancer.

The researchers also tried giving immunized mice interleukin-12, a protein that stimulates cancer-killing cells, for several days after they were infected with cancer-causing cells. The mice who got a combination of immunization and treatment with interleukin-12 survived significantly longer than those who got only one of these treatments.

Writing in the October 1999 issue of "The Journal of Urology," the researchers noted that human bladder cancer consistently shows mutated and over-expressed versions of this gene. The current study shows that the protein developed from it can stimulate the immune system and cause it to slow cancer growth in mice. The authors call for more studies of this process with the hope of using ras mutations to fight human bladder cancer.