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Synthetic vitamin D prevents skin cancer in mice By Mary Elizabeth Hopkins September 5, 2000
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Washington. A synthetic vitamin D solution could help prevent skin cancer in a decade or so, if approved by the Food and Drug Administration, a Johns Hopkins University researcher said at the American Chemical Society’s recent meeting in Washington. Four forms of chemically modified vitamin D reduced the incidence of skin cancer in mice who’d been given an agent to promote the cancer, said Gary Posner, MD, professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. Posner said 28 percent fewer mice had skin cancer occurrences after 20 weeks of treatment with the new forms of vitamin D, called deltanoids or vitamin D analogs. "This is the very first stage of preclinical evaluation," Posner said. It’s useful for nurses to know that there are serious scientific efforts at developing new chemical compounds that have the possibility of working safely, he said. The chemically modified form of vitamin D does not appear to cause hypercalcemia in animals, as some types have, Posner said in the July/August issue of Carcinogenesis. "We’ve actually separated out the good from the bad in this type of vitamin D," he said. The National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health funded the research. |
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