Scientists in the new push to control cancer before curing it

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

Without abandoning the quest for an ultimate cure, 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 due to the disease and the biggest challenge we face in dealing with it" said Paul Workman, chief executive of the British Cancer Institute (ICR) – a charity and research institute that will lead the new Center for Cancer Drug Discovery.

The center, funded by the ICR with 75 million pounds ($ 96.5 million), "will seek to rise to the challenge of cancer evolution," Workman said by blocking his workflow. ;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 very 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 expertise in anti-evolution therapies so that scientists can "stop catching 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 of time." # 39; advance. "

(Report by Kate Kelland, edited by Mark Heinrich)