Cancer is a diagnosis that no one wants to hear. Anyone who has survived cancer themselves or who has watched a loved one manage the disease would likely shudder at the word itself. While we can do our best to prevent cancer, sometimes, despite all efforts, it still develops. Current cancer treatment methods are often limited and can be damaging themselves, leading scientists to look for more effective, less harmful ways to take cancer down. Stanford researchers have made an incredible breakthrough in cancer therapy by utilizing the natural process of apoptosis to prompt cancer cells to eliminate themselves. This innovative method has the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment strategies.
Exploiting Apoptosis for Cancer Therapy
Apoptosis is not a new biological process. It exists in nature, even in our own bodies. Our bodies renew and get rid of over 60 billion cells every single day. Dr. Gerald Crabtree, while out for a walk in California’s Kings Mountain, was thinking about this biological phenomenon when he had the thought: Could he and his team leverage both the specificity and efficiency of this mechanism to combat cancer? If they could, this would mean the ability to have cancer cells kill themselves, without any adverse effects on the healthy cells around them.
“It occurred to me, Well gee, this is the way we want to treat cancer,” said Crabtree, a co-senior author on the study. “We essentially want to have the same kind of specificity that can eliminate 60 billion cells with no bystanders, so no cell is killed that is not the proper object of the killing mechanism.”
The Molecular Glue: Activating Cell Death Genes in Cancer Cells
The thing is, while they can be life-saving, traditional cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy also do a lot of damage. They are not specific, so while they kill cancer cells, they also harm the healthy cells around the cancer. When a patient is recovering from cancer, they are recovering as much from the treatment as they are from the cancer itself. There has also been some research that shows that these traditional treatment methods can actually cause more cancer down the road. With that thought, Crabtree and his team got to work to see if they could successfully induce the effect in cancer cells. The researchers engineered a unique molecular compound that binds together two proteins – BCL6 and CDK9 – to trigger the activation of apoptosis genes in cancer cells. By redirecting an oncogenic protein like BCL6, responsible for cell immortality in blood cancers, towards inducing cell death, they have effectively turned cancer cells on themselves.
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Targeting Specific Cancer Cells: Precision and Efficiency in Therapy
Unlike traditional cancer treatments that often harm healthy cells, this novel technique demonstrates a remarkable specificity for cancer cells. By harnessing the intrinsic characteristics of cancer cells, the scientists have developed a strategy that aims to eliminate cancer dependencies and promote targeted cancer cell destruction. In layman’s terms, they have made the thing that makes cancer cells almost immortal into a self-killing machine.
“The idea is, can you turn a cancer dependency into a cancer-killing signal?” Nathanael Gray, PhD, co-senior author with Crabtree, asked himself. “You take something that the cancer is addicted to for its survival and you flip the script and make that be the very thing that kills it.”
Promising Results and Future Prospects
Initial tests of the molecule on diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells in the lab have shown promising results, with high potency in killing cancer cells. Importantly, the compound exhibited minimal toxic effects on healthy cells, providing hope for its potential clinical application. This is another great example of people using research already being done but in a new way. It is innovations like this one that could potentially lead to a new era of cancer treatment.
“Since oncogenes were discovered, people have been trying to shut them down in cancer,” said Roman Sarott, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Medicine and co-first author on the study. “Instead, we’re trying to use them to turn signaling on that, we hope, will prove beneficial for treatment.”
Towards Clinical Translation: Investigating Therapeutic Efficacy in Living Organisms
Now that they have successfully induced this effect on cells, the next step is to see if it works the same way in living organisms. The researchers are now conducting further studies to evaluate the compound’s efficacy in living animals, particularly in mouse models with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. This translational research holds immense promise for the development of effective and precise cancer therapies. If their success continues in animal studies, eventually the new technology will move to human trials with volunteer B-cell lymphoma patients. Who knows, perhaps scientists will even be able to adapt it to other forms of cancer, as well.
A New Era in Cancer Treatment?
This incredible work by the Stanford researchers is being called groundbreaking by experts everywhere. Most importantly, it is giving hope not only to anyone who has lost a loved one to B-cell lymphoma or who has recently received this terrible diagnosis. Anyone who has been touched by cancer can’t help but feel even just a little bit more hopeful with research like this. As the team continues to explore the potential of this method and its adaptability to other types of cancer, the future of cancer treatment looks increasingly promising.
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