* This cell population is rare and difficult to study in the laboratory
* The chemical compound that he was the target Salinomycin
* The substance is 100 times more powerful than those used in chemotherapy
They are responsible for the growth of tumors and their recurrence, and immune to conventional treatments against this disease. However, a team of researchers recently announced that it has found a chemical compound that attacks a selective stem cells of cancer. A discovery that opens a new avenue for the development of antitumor therapies, "according to the authors.
"Many treatments for cancer, but kill most tumor cells, ultimately fail because they do not eliminate the cancer stem cells that regenerate the tumor to survive," explained the researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) in pages of the journal 'Cell'.
These cells represent a small proportion of all those that make up a tumor, which makes their isolation and, moreover, is complicated to handle in the laboratory, a further obstacle to investigate them. To try and avoid these pitfalls, Piyush Gupta, the Department of Biology of the said center, and his colleagues manipulated samples of breast tumors to enhance the presence of stem cells.
After undergoing a process called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (important in phenomena such as the occurrence of metastases) Gupta and his team found that the number of stem cells had increased 100 times, as well as resistance to chemotherapy of the population.
After analyzed the effect of 16,000 compounds, including natural extracts and market principles on these cells. The process was simple: choose a group of cells was grown for one day, after adding the chemical agent and three days later analyzed whether cells had died and in what degree.
10% of the compounds reduced the viability of the crop but, of these, 98% did not selectively attack the cancer cells but also the rest. Of the 32 chemicals that showed selective toxicity against these cells, eight were selected for their properties to be subjected to more thorough examinations.
An antibiotic compound
After numerous tests, the researchers gave the winning candidate with the salinomycin, a compound with antibiotic properties that reduced 100-fold the proportion of cancer stem cells compared to paclitaxel, an anticancer very common. Furthermore, cells treated with salinomycin had less ability to cause tumors when injected into mice.
"To date, the anti-cancer therapies are designed to target specific genetic alterations present in tumors, the authors suggest. "Our findings indicate that there may be another useful way for its development: the search for agents directed at specific stages of differentiation of cancer cells." In the future, they conclude, the traditional drug treatments combined with other specially developed to eliminate cancer stem cells.
0 comments:
Post a Comment