New research led by a team of scientists from the Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States would point to a promising strategy that would trick cancer cells into consuming certain drugs , thereby increasing the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments. .
As the scientists themselves think, it can be difficult at first to get the right amount of anticancer drugs into a given tumor. Therefore, they have proposed a new approach consisting of binding these drugs to albumin , which could facilitate the work.
The findings have been published in ‘Nature Nanotechnology’, and the strategy would be based on taking advantage of the great appetite that tumors feel for protein nutrients, which they use to grow. In fact, it not only takes advantage of that appetite but increases it, making the tumor more vulnerable to treatments .
Thus, by consuming the available albumin, the tumors would inadvertently absorb the drugs used during treatment, thereby increasing their effectiveness.
Albumin is an abundant protein that we find in the blood. And the researchers note that tumors love to consume protein to fuel cancer growth itself. Now, by consuming albumin, it will also mean taking toxic compounds that are essentially helpful in poisoning the different cancer cells .
What drugs can successfully bind to blood proteins?
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of a popular drug that binds nanoparticulate albumin (nab-PTX). In fact, the study authors have indicated that this treatment has already been used successfully in patients with late-stage pancreatic and lung cancers in the past. Although they recognize that the results are not always so promising.
This is due to the fact that not all patients respond to nab-PTX, just as the effectiveness of its administration to tumors has been, for the moment, mixed, due to an incomplete understanding of how albumin can affect not only the administration, but to the actions and effects of the drug itself.
To address this issue, the team of scientists examined the delivery, at the cellular level, of nanoparticles to cancerous tumors. Specifically, they used 3D microscopy and what is known as tissue cleaning technology .
This is how scientists discovered that different cancer cells normally consume a large amount of nab-PTX in the blood, while certain signaling pathways appear to control the amount of nutrients (such as albumin) that tumor cells ingest. . That is, the consumption of these drugs is controlled by the signaling pathways involved in the absorption of nutrients by cells.
This offered the researchers the possibility of manipulating these pathways, being able to “trick” cancer cells into a state of nutrient deficiency, which would greatly improve their consumption of nab-PTX, thus self-destructing.
Tricking cancer cells into self-destruction
The researchers treated the tumors with a growth factor 1 receptor inhibitor , which is known to be insulin-like. It is, in fact, one of the signaling pathways that is responsible for controlling the appetite of a tumor.
The results obtained by the scientists have revealed that the treatments improved remarkably , since those tumors that consumed a greater amount of nab-PTX together with albumin, self-destruct as the effectiveness of the drug increased.
And, as they point out, “these results offer new possibilities to improve the administration of drugs linked to albumin”, mainly “in patients with various types of cancer.”
