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Scientists have dismantled cancer, piece by piece, to reveal the weaknesses and propose new treatment ideas.
A team from the Wellcome Sanger Institute has disabled each genetic instruction, one at a time, in 30 types of cancer.
It has generated 600 new cancer vulnerabilities and each could be the target of a drug.
Cancer Research UK welcomed the scale of the study.
Precision
The study announces the future of personalized medicine against cancer. At the moment, drugs like chemotherapy cause damage throughout the body.
Dr. Fiona Behan, whose mother died of cancer for the second time, is one of the researchers.
The first cycle of chemotherapy damaged her mother's heart. She was not physically strong enough for many treatments the second time.
Dr. Behan told the BBC, "This is very important because we are currently treating cancer by treating the whole body of the patient, and we are not specifically targeting cancer cells.
"The information we found in this study has identified key weak points in cancer cells and will allow us to develop drugs that target cancer and preserve healthy tissue."
Genetic Aberration
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Researchers believe their work could lead to new treatments
Cancer is caused by mutations inside the cells of our body that modify the written instructions in our DNA.
Mutations corrupt cells, causing them to grow uncontrollably, spreading around the body and eventually killing people.
The researchers embarked on a gigantic tour de force to disable each genetic instruction – called gene – in cancers, to determine which ones were essential for survival.
They disrupted nearly 20,000 genes in more than 300 laboratory-grown tumors from 30 different types of cancer.
They used a tool called Crispr – the same genetic technology used to rearrange two babies in China last year.
This is a relatively new, easy and inexpensive tool for manipulating DNA, and this study would have been an impossible feat just ten years ago.
The results, published in the journal Nature, revealed 6,000 essential genes that at least one type of cancer needs to survive.
Some are not suitable for the development of anticancer drugs because they are also essential for healthy cells.
Others are already the target of precision drugs like Herceptin in bad cancer – the team has called this test a "mental health check" that proves that their method works.
And yet, far beyond current scientific knowledge to develop adapted drugs, researchers have selected a shortlist of 600 new potential targets for drugs to attack.
Laser sight
One of the potential targets is "Werner syndrome RecQ helicase", also referred to as simply WRN.
The research team felt that it was essential to keep alive some of the most genetically unstable cancers.
WRN plays a vital role in about 15% of colon cancers and 28% of stomach cancers, but no drug targets it.
The work was a collaboration between Sanger, the European laboratory of molecular biology and the pharmaceutical giant GSK. All results are available to the public.
The ultimate goal of the research is to develop a "cancer dependency map" of each vulnerability in each type of cancer.
Doctors could then test a patient's tumor and administer a badtail of precision drugs to kill the cancer cells.
Dr. Behan told the BBC: "We understood what was happening in the cancer cells so that we could fire our machine gun at the cancer cells, not at the whole body, as chemotherapy does.
"This is the first step to install a laser sight on our machine gun."
Prof. Karen Vousden, Chief Scientist at Cancer Research UK, said: "What makes this research so powerful is scale.
"This work provides excellent starting points and the next step will be a thorough badysis of the genes identified as weaknesses in this study, to determine if they will eventually lead to the development of new treatments." for patients. "
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