A team of scientists from Melbourne, Australia, has discovered a new type of cancer drug that can put cancer cells to sleep permanently, stopping their growth and spread throughout the body. And without side effects for healthy cells. It is, without a doubt, a new milestone in medicine that will change the way we treat cancer, according to the journal Nature .
This new type of drug could provide an incredible alternative for cancer patients, and it has already shown great promise in stopping cancer progression in blood and liver cancer models, as well as delaying cancer relapse.
Permanent dream
The research, led by Tim Thomas and Anne Voss of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Jonathan Baell of the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Brendon Monahan of Cancer Therapeutics CRC, investigated whether inhibiting KAT6A and KAT6B could represent a new approach to treating cancer. .
Both proteins – KAT6A and KAT6B – are known to play an important role in the conduction of cancer. KAT6A is at number 12 on the list of genes most commonly amplified in cancers.
“ From the beginning, we discovered that the genetic depletion of KAT6A quadrupled life expectancy in animal models of blood cancer called lymphoma. Armed with the knowledge that KAT6A is a major cancer factor, we began to look for ways to inhibit the protein to treat cancer, “Thomas clarifies.
No More DNA Damage: The Differences in Therapies
The research work spanned nearly a decade, requiring strong collaboration between experts in cancer research, medical chemistry, and drug discovery.
Chemotherapy and radiation therapy work by causing irreversible DNA damage . Cancer cells cannot repair this damage and die. The downside is that these therapies cannot target cancer cells alone and can also cause significant damage to healthy cells. This causes well-known short-term side effects, such as nausea, fatigue, hair loss, and susceptibility to infections, as well as long-term effects, such as infertility and an increased risk of developing other types of cancer.
“This new class of compounds stops cancer cells from dividing by deactivating their ability to ‘activate’ the start of the cell cycle. The technical term is cellular senescence. Cells are not dead, but they can no longer divide and proliferate. Without it capacity, cancer cells stop in their tracks, “explains Voss.
“There is still a lot of work to do to get to a point where this class of drugs can be investigated in human cancer patients. However, our discovery suggests that these drugs could be particularly effective as a type of consolidation therapy that delays or it prevents relapse after initial treatment , “continues Voss.
“The possibility of giving physicians another tool that they could use to substantially delay cancer recurrence could have a huge impact on patients, ” he concludes.
Reference: Jonathan B. Baell et al. Inhibitors of histone acetyltransferases KAT6A / B induce senescence and arrest tumor growth, Nature (2018). DOI: 10.1038 / s41586-018-0387-5
Image credit: NIH
