Cancer cells move around the body (become metastatic) by chopping up the dense matrix that surrounds them. But drugs that prevent the chopping have been disappointing in animal and human anti-cancer trials. Now researchers provide an explanation for this failure: the drug-treated cells revert to a primordial, ameboid form of cell movement that allows them to squeeze through gaps in the matrix.
Using a novel gene therapy approach that boosts the body?s immune system, a researcher has cured cancer in laboratory mice. In experiments reported in the Dec. 15 issue of Cancer Research, Chung Lee and colleagues at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University applied the gene therapy technique to render immune cells insensitive to transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta), a powerful, naturally occurring substance in the body called an immunosuppressor that enables cancer cells to evade surveillance by the immune system. The approach boosted the mice?s immune system, which virtually eliminated cancerous tumors in the animals’ lungs and prostate gland.
Researchers in Los Angeles have combined a special protein that targets cancer cells with neural stem cells to track and attack malignant brain tumor cells. Glioblastoma multiforme, or gliomas, are a particularly deadly type of brain tumor. They are highly invasive with poorly defined borders that intermingle with healthy brain tissue, making them nearly impossible to remove surgically without catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, cells separate from the main tumor and migrate to form satellites that escape treatment and often lead to recurrence.
A Chinese medical equipment manufacturer says it will begin marketing a test kit that can detect the presence of tumour abnormal protein (TAP), from a single drop of blood. That, the company says, can provide cell diagnostics up to three years before terminal cancer is formed, and before any clinical symptoms appear.
The use of live bacteria to treat cancer goes back a hundred years. But while the therapy can sometimes shrink tumors, the treatment usually leads to toxicity, limiting its value in medicine. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have isolated a protein secreted by bacteria that kills cancer cells but appears to have no harmful side effects. Tested in mice injected with human melanomas, the protein shrank the malignancies, but, in contrast with other studies using whole bacteria, caused no deaths or adverse reactions in the laboratory animals.
Today, even the best cancer treatments kill about as many healthy cells as they do cancer cells. But a St. Louis researcher has begun to lay the conceptual and experimental groundwork for a new strategy for chemotherapy — one that turns existing drugs into medicinal “smart bombs.” The approach is essentially a sophisticated drug releasing system, one that can recognize and use cancerous DNA sequences as triggering mechanisms for the drugs that fight them.
Using neural stem cells to hunt down and kill cancer cells, researchers have successfully tested a new treatment for brain cancer. They now hope the technique will lead to an effective treatment for glioma, the most aggressive form of primary brain tumor in humans. As the Cedars-Sianai researchers note, the prognosis has historically been extremely poor for patients diagnosed with malignant gliomas. The tumors have poorly defined margins, and glioma cells often spread deep into healthy brain tissue making their surgical removal difficult. Often, pockets of tumor cells break off from the main tumor and migrate deep into non-tumorous areas of the brain. Therefore, even if the original tumor is completely removed or destroyed, the risk of recurrence is high as cells in these distant “satellites” multiply and eventually re-form a new brain tumor. Due to these characteristics, treating brain cancer has been extremely difficult.
A cousin to the anti-anxiety drug Valium has been shown in mice to reduce some of the symptoms associated with lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues. “The best available therapies for lupus haven’t changed for many, many years,” says U-M’s Gary D. Glick, Ph.D., one of the lead authors on the study. “It’s a disease where the mechanisms that normally prevent the immune system from attacking components of one’s own body are defective. Because we do not yet understand what triggers lupus, it has been very difficult to develop lupus-specific therapies.”