Scientists in the new push to control cancer before curing it | Life

LONDON, May 16 – British cancer scientists are launching what they call the world's first "Darwinian" drug development program, with the goal of making cancer resistant to newer treatments and recurring in many patients.

While not abandoning the quest for ultimate treatment, the "anti-evolution" project will again focus on turning cancer into a drug-controllable disease for many years.

It would be a bit like HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, scientists told reporters at a briefing.

"The ability of cancer to adapt, evolve and resist medication is at the root of the vast majority of deaths from disease and the greatest challenge we face in dealing with it" said Paul Workman, general manager of the British Cancer Institute (ICR), in Britain. – a charity and research institute that will lead the new Center for Cancer Drug Discovery.

The center, funded to the tune of 75 million pounds sterling (401.5 million RM) by the ICR, "will seek to meet the challenge of cancer evolution," Workman said by blocking his process d & # 39; evolution.

The teams at the new center will initially focus on two possible routes to do so.

The first, called "evolutionary evolution," consists in selecting an initial specific treatment that forces the cancer cells to adapt so as to make them highly susceptible to a second drug or to push them into an evolutionary impasse.

The second will explore a new class of drugs to target the cancer's ability to evolve and become resistant to treatment. These potential drugs would be designed to block the action of molecules called APOBEC proteins, present in the body's immune system.

The researchers hope that a new class of APOBEC inhibitors could be developed and combined with targeted cancer treatments to try to contain cancer longer.

Combined therapies using several current or new therapies will also be explored, Workman said.

Olivia Rossanese, an anti-cancer drug discovery specialist who will lead the new center's biology team, said the idea was to create a global hub of anti-evolution therapies so that scientists could "stop catching up with the disease." Cancer".

"This Darwinian approach to drug discovery gives us the best chance of overcoming cancer," she said, "because we will be able to predict what cancer will do and have a length in advance. "- Reuters