In all that verbiage, I didn’t quite catch everything. Is this a cure for ALL types of cancer? Specifically, is chronic lymphocytic lymphoma (my cancer) included? How is this different than the action of rituxin, which is a monoclonal antibody which binds to the surface proteins of my lymphocytes and cause them to self-destruct?
I’m not a doctor and I won’t play one on FR..................
What the article said is that the cancer would be analyzed and three peptides (targets) would be selected from a large library and used to treat your specific cancer. The proposed treatment is very customizable.
My concern is that the treatment has only been demonstrated in mice who have been infected with human cancers. As a scientist, this gives me several questions. I’m not going to go into all of them (unless someone asks).
“How is this different than the action of rituxin, which is a monoclonal antibody which binds to the surface proteins of my lymphocytes and cause them to self-destruct?”
Very similar. Rituxan binds to one specific surface protein. That surface molecule is Rituxan’s target.
This group is suggesting using a certain technology to identify at least three targets for any given cancer and three therapeutic molecules to bind to each one. This is essentially three drugs to kill the cells using three different targets.
The idea is if one drug fails to fully kill all the cancer cells (not all cells may respond - in your case Rituxan may not affect every cancer cell) there are two others and there won’t be any cells that can escape all three.
The breakthrough, if successful, would be the ability to dynamically identify three targets for any given cancer and simultaneously produce molecules that can act as a drug against each target.