Cancer breakthrough as tumour cells induced to ‘commit suicide’

Cancer cells may be induced to successfully “commit suicide” by feeding them a recipe to supply a pure micro organism toxin.

This is the discovering of a staff of researchers from Israel, who’ve demonstrated the idea in a mouse mannequin of the pores and skin most cancers melanoma.

They confirmed {that a} single injection was able to killing 44–66 % of skin cancer cells focused.

The toxin recipe was encoded into messenger RNA molecules that had been then packed in nanoparticles coated in antibodies designed to make sure they solely affected the most cancers cells.

In this manner, the therapy strategy — if proven to additionally work in people — may overcome one of many foremost limitations of chemotherapy, which isn’t selective and causes negative effects.

The research was undertaken by biochemist Professor Dan Peer of Israel’s Tel Aviv University and his colleagues.

Prof. Peer defined: “Many bacteria secrete toxins. The most famous of these is probably the botulinum toxins injected in Botox treatments.

“Another classic treatment technique is chemotherapy, involving the delivery of small molecules through the bloodstream to effectively kill cancer cells.

“However, chemotherapy has a major downside — it is not selective, and also kills healthy cells.”

Prof. Peer continued: “Our concept was to ship protected mRNA molecules encoded for a bacterial toxin on to the most cancers cells.”

This approach, he explained, works by “inducing these cells to actually produce the toxic protein that would later kill them. It’s like placing a Trojan horse inside the cancer cell”.

In their experiments, the team encoded the genetic information needed to manufacture the toxin produced by the pseudomonas genus of bacteria into messenger RNA (mRNA).

(Pseudomonas includes 313 species of gram-negative bacteria that have a great deal of metabolic diversity and are thus found in various settings — with some living in soil, others in plants, and others still even able to infect humans.)

The mRNA molecules were wrapped up in lipid nanoparticles that were then coated in antibodies designed to be selective to melanoma cancer cells.

Prof. Peer said: “We used pseudomonas bacteria and the melanoma cancer, but this was only a matter of convenience.

“Many anaerobic bacteria — especially those that live in the ground — secrete toxins, and most of these toxins can probably be used with our method.

“This is our ‘recipe’, and we know how to deliver it directly to the target cells with our nanoparticles.”

Prof. Peer continued: “When the cancer cell reads the ‘recipe’ at the other end, it starts to produce the toxin as if it were the bacteria itself, and this self-produced toxin eventually kills it.

“Thus, with a simple injection to the tumour bed, we can cause cancer cells to ‘commit suicide‘, without damaging healthy cells.”

He concluded: “Moreover, cancer cells cannot develop resistance to our technology, as often happens with chemotherapy — because we can always use a different natural toxin.”

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Theranostics.

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