Scientists from Stanford University (USA) have developed a molecule that makes cancer cells self-destruct through the mechanism of apoptosis.
Every day, billions of cells in the human body die through a natural process known as apoptosis. When apoptosis does not work properly, cells become malignant and can cause life-threatening disease. Currently, researchers at Stanford University (USA) are working on an innovative method of treating and potentially eradicating a certain type of cancer.
In a recently published research describes a method of re-activating apoptosis in mutated cells. This actually means forced self-destruction of cancer with the help of a bioengineered binding molecule.
Gerald Crabtree, one of the authors of the study and a professor of developmental biology, said that the idea came to him while walking in the Kings Mountain in California during the pandemic. The new compound is supposed to bind two proteins that already exist in cancer cells, restoring the process of apoptosis and causing cancer to self-destruct.
«We aim to achieve the same specificity that can kill 60 billion cells without side effects,» Crabtree explains.
This means that no cell should be destroyed unless it is the direct target of this new mechanism. The two proteins involved are BCL6, an oncogene that represses genes that promote apoptosis in B-cell lymphoma, and CDK9, an enzyme that catalyzes gene activation instead.
Mutated BCL6 proteins block the signal that should normally prompt cancer cells to activate apoptosis. Traditional non-radical cancer treatments have tried to neutralize oncogenes, while the new study suggests a mechanism for their use.
«We take what the cancer depends on for its survival and change the scenario so that it is what kills it,» Crabtree says.
The researchers tested the new molecule, designed to bind BCL6 and CDK9, on diffuse B-cell lymphoma cells in the laboratory, where the compound demonstrated effectiveness in killing cancer cells. They then tested the compound in healthy mice to see if it had any toxic effects on normal cells, which it did not. However, the molecule did seem to affect a certain type of immune cell (B cells) that also contained an unmutated version of the BCL6 protein.
The team is now testing the molecule in mice with diffuse B-cell lymphoma to test the effectiveness of the cancer-killing technique in living organisms. The technique depends on the natural supply of BCL6 and CDK9 in cells, which means it is likely to be effective only against cancerous lymphomas. After testing the new molecule on 859 different types of cancer cells in the laboratory, the researchers confirmed that it is able to destroy only diffuse B-cell lymphoma cells.
Source: Techspot