<p>People with lung, stomach, skin, bladder, pancreatic and ovarian cancer appear to beat their disease with a common chemotherapy called platinum treatment.<br /><br />However, the diseases often return after they appear to develop resistance to the drug. Sometimes they are put on second-line therapies, but these often do not perform as well.<br />But, a team at the Ovarian Cancer Action in the UK now found that cancers do not become resistant over the time.<br /><br />Instead, minute traces of cancers that were always resistant to platinum therapy remain there and cause the relapse of the disease, the Daily Telegraph reported.<br /><br />This discovery helped them identify four or five different molecular "targets" that could be the focus of new drugs, Prof Hani Gabra, director of the UK charity's research centre, said.<br /><br />"These cancers look like they are platinum-resistant, but in fact they were there from the outset and they were never touched by the drugs," he said.<br /><br />Unaffected, they had simply taken their time to grow, he explained.<br /><br />That step-change in understanding meant they were able to concentrate on what exactly was different about the tumours which appeared later, the researchers reported in the journal Cancer Research.</p>
<p>People with lung, stomach, skin, bladder, pancreatic and ovarian cancer appear to beat their disease with a common chemotherapy called platinum treatment.<br /><br />However, the diseases often return after they appear to develop resistance to the drug. Sometimes they are put on second-line therapies, but these often do not perform as well.<br />But, a team at the Ovarian Cancer Action in the UK now found that cancers do not become resistant over the time.<br /><br />Instead, minute traces of cancers that were always resistant to platinum therapy remain there and cause the relapse of the disease, the Daily Telegraph reported.<br /><br />This discovery helped them identify four or five different molecular "targets" that could be the focus of new drugs, Prof Hani Gabra, director of the UK charity's research centre, said.<br /><br />"These cancers look like they are platinum-resistant, but in fact they were there from the outset and they were never touched by the drugs," he said.<br /><br />Unaffected, they had simply taken their time to grow, he explained.<br /><br />That step-change in understanding meant they were able to concentrate on what exactly was different about the tumours which appeared later, the researchers reported in the journal Cancer Research.</p>