Posted on 02/04/2007 11:45:52 AM PST by anymouse
Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realized she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment.
Schaefer and colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York believe they have discovered a new way to attack tumors that have learned how to evade existing drugs.
Tests in mice suggest the compound helps break down the cell walls of tumors, almost like destroying a tumor cell's "skeleton."
The researchers will test the new compound for safety and hope they can develop it to treat cancers such as colon cancer, esophageal cancer, liver and skin cancers.
"I was using these cancer cells as models of the normal intestine," Schaefer said in a telephone interview.
Normal human cells are difficult to grow and study in the lab, because they tend to die. But cancer cells live much longer and are harder to kill, so scientists often use them.
Schaefer was looking for drugs to treat the inflammation seen in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, both of which cause pain and diarrhea.
She was testing a compound called a PPAR-gamma modulator. It would never normally have been thought of as a cancer drug, or in fact a drug of any kind.
"I made a calculation error and used a lot more than I should have. And my cells died," Schaefer said.
A colleague overheard her complaining. "The co-author on my paper said,' Did I hear you say you killed some cancer?' I said 'Oh', and took a closer look."
They ran several tests and found the compound killed "pretty much every epithelial tumor cell lines we have seen," Schaefer said. Epithelial cells line organs such as the colon, and also make up skin.
It also killed colon tumors in mice without making the mice sick, they reported in the journal International Cancer Research.
The compound works in much the same way as the taxane drugs, including Taxol, which were originally derived from Pacific yew trees.
"It targets part of the cell cytoskeleton called tubulin," Schaefer said. Tubulin is used to build microtubules, which in turn make up the cell's structure.
Destroying it kills the cell, but cancer cells eventually evolve mechanisms to pump out the drugs that do this, a problem called resistance.
"Resistance to anti-tubulin therapies is a huge problem in many cancers. We see this as another way to get to the tubulin," Schaefer said.
The PPAR-gamma compound does this in a different way from the taxanes, which might mean it could overcome the resistance that tumor cells often develop to chemotherapy.
"Most of the drugs like Taxol affect the ability of tubulin to forms into microtubules. This doesn't do that -- it causes the tubulin itself to disappear. We do not know why."
Schaefer's team plans more safety tests in mice. As the compound is already patented, her team will probably have to design something slightly different to be able to patent it as a new drug.
Taxol, developed by U.S. National Cancer Institute researchers and manufactured by Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1993, had annual sales of $1.6 billion at its peak in 2000.
bttt
A question for all my fellow Freepers: After reading this article about finding a cure for Cancer, the question just popped into my head, being a cancer survivor myself also my wife has worked for an Oncologist for 14 years and I just asked her. In these tests, how do they give the mice the different forms of Cancer? My wife could not answer the question and she told me to drop it because she did not want to get freaked out.
You'd best take that sentence out. Believing that cells evolve is religion.
Another thing that is interesting is the noting that Cancer cells can be "immortal" in the lab, because they grow so fast. There are cells called He-La, that were grown from a woman's cancer for years after she died.
They use nude mice which gets its name because it has no hair. Nude mice have no thymus gland and therefore cannot generate mature T lymphocytes. Therefore they are unable to mount most types of immune responses. The absence of functioning T cells prevents nude mice from rejecting not only allografts (from other nude mice), but they cannot even reject xenografts; that is, grafts of tissue from another species.
Human cancer cells grown in culture can be injected subcutaneously into the nude mouse, and will grow to form a human tumor in the mice. This allows researchers to test a variety of cancer drugs on the mouse and see what happens to the human cancer. One can also grow skin cells from other species in the nude mouse. For example, you can get cells from a chicken, inject them into the mouse, and it will grow feathers on the skin.
The immunity comes from evolution through natural selection. When someone with cancers is given chemotherapy, cancer cells die. But not always all of them. A few cancer cells may have a variation that lets them survive the chemo. They continue to reproduce and the cancer comes bsck. This time, though, the cancer is descended from the few cells that were immune to chemo the first time so repeat chemo has almost no success the second time around.
After reading your post, I think you may also be interested in this thread:
"Cheap, Safe Drug Kills Most Cancers"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1778434/posts
Thanks for the post, bump for later reading & kill 2 birds with one stone.
I didn't bookmark it, and I cannot find it. Anyone help me out?
I didn't bookmark it, and I cannot find it. Anyone help me out?
Thanks! Cool news!
I appreciate any cancer breakthrough.
God Bless America,
MaxMax.
I think X-Rays were discovered by accident.
Most of them, at least in chemistry.
Mark
Lexan, Gortex, there are quite a few...
Mark
Along with death and taxes...that is one thing you can always count on.
Do some reading on dichloroacetate. It's being looked at as a new cancer treatment as well.
DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.
Let's watch and see how quickly this compound comes through trials and gets approved by the FDA.
Thanks for the info. It is mind boggling, this stuff. About the cancer though, why do doctors say that Cancer surviviors cannot donate blood?
Again, thanks for all the info and have a nice day.
LOL Fleming was a sloppy scientist who didn't clean his petri dishes :)
That's what got us penicilin!
Penicillin was discovered by accident.
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