Actually, a way to have the cells kill themselves, sorta, sideways. By taking advantage of the changes in the environment inside ONLY cancer cells, a new mechanism hits the “Big Death Button”.
Every cells has a mechanism by which it kills itself off – but this is certainly new in how scientists are turning it on by command:
Webs of molecular fibers kill cancer cells from the inside out
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have demonstrated an intriguing new way to fight cancer by introducing molecular fibers into cells. While harmless to healthy cells, once these fibers encounter the specific environment of cancer cells they assemble into webs, activating the tumor’s self-destruct sequence.
Currently, our best weapons against cancer are radiation and chemotherapy, and while reasonably effective they both act more like a shotgun blast than a sniper shot, harming healthy cells at the same time. That causes all sorts of side effects to a patient’s health.
As such, a key avenue of cancer research involves finding ways to specifically target tumors without harming the healthy cells around them. One of the best ways to do that is to take advantage of the unique environment inside cancer cells, and that’s what the new study has tried to do.
“In cancer tissue, the environment is much more acidic than in normal tissue,” says David Ng, lead researcher on the study. “In addition, much more highly reactive oxidative molecules are found within the cancer cells due to the cancer’s increased metabolic activity – and we take advantage of that.”
To do so, the team created molecular fibers that would theoretically be introduced to a patient’s body, entering both healthy and cancerous cells. These fibers are made up of sequences of peptides that cleave and connect in different patterns based on the environment they encounter. While harmless to healthy cells, they turn lethal when they encounter the features that mark cancer tissue – acidity and more reactive oxidative molecules.
Once exposed to that environment, the fibers begin to join together, forming a web-like structure that grows inside the cancer cell itself. The team says that these webs are stable enough to physically deform the cell, to the point where they trigger programmed cell death.
The researchers point out that this method leaves healthy cells alone, and attacks the cancer in a way that it can’t defend itself against. That bypasses a common problem with chemical attacks, which many tumors develop resistance to.
In tests on lab cultures of cancer cells, the team demonstrated that the method was able to kill the tumors in around four hours.
It’s still very early days for the research, with the method yet to be tested in animals, let alone humans. In the meantime, the team is working on making the process more precise and developing a way to degrade the webs after the cancer cells have died off.
For whatever reason, I seldom post about stuff that my academic training said I should be: molecular biology and computer systems analysis and design. I should do more of it even as I’ve picked up politics as a third attribute (but more self-taught than book learned). This happened to catch my eye as this seems to be a Big Deal. One of the big bugaboos with current cancer treatments, until just recently, is that most treatments also affect healthy cells at the same time of trying to kill cancer cells. People hate radiology and chemotherapy because of the side effects of that “truism” – the sickness and fatigue that comes with them because other parts of the body are affected.
If this new “scaffolding” mechanism does end holding up, this could be a revolutionary way to treat cancer of a lot of different types. It doesn’t depend on chromosomal changes, RNA / DNA, it doesn’t need to pinpoint specific metabolic pathways – just the “waste” left over from increased cellular metabolism (which is what I studied back in the Dark Ages of the Biotech Revolution).
(H/T: New Atlas)
