Hormone May Help Treat AIDS-Related Condition
A hormone found in pregnant women may be useful for treating Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-related condition that causes disfiguring skin lesions.
The hormone killed Kaposi’s sarcoma cells in the laboratory, and in mice it shrank tumors caused by injections of Kaposi’s sarcoma cells, Dr. Robert Gallo said.
Gallo, chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., reports a series of experiments in today’s issue of the journal Nature with colleague Dr. Yanto Lunardi-Iskandar and others at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere.
Kaposi’s sarcoma, once seen mainly in elderly men, now appears most frequently in homosexual men infected with the AIDS virus, affecting more than 30% of them in the United States. Researchers do not know why gay men are more likely to get Kaposi’s.
Up to a fifth of those with Kaposi’s get life-threatening lung tumors.
The hormone is called human chorionic gonadotropin. It is produced by the placenta early in pregnancy, and it stimulates the ovaries to produce other hormones needed to maintain a healthy pregnancy. Synthetic forms are used in preventing miscarriages and treating some kinds of infertility.
The researchers reported that Kaposi’s sarcoma cells that normally create tumors in mice were unable to do so if they were exposed to the hormone before being injected into the animals. Also, mice that were treated with the hormone for a week before being injected with the cells showed no tumors or much smaller ones than in untreated mice.
Gallo said other experiments found that hormone treatment could shrink established tumors in mice.
The paper also describes two women with Kaposi’s sarcoma whose skin lesions disappeared during or after pregnancy.
Current treatments can slow the development of new lesions and cause existing ones to disappear for long periods, said Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, a professor of dermatology and microbiology at the New York University Medical Center. But the hormone may also be very helpful because lesions eventually become resistant to conventional therapy, he said.
