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New cancer therapy holds potential to switch off major cancer types
- pazimzadeh 5y agoHere is the research: Small-molecule inhibitors that disrupt the MTDH–SND1 complex suppress breast cancer progression and metastasis https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-021-00279-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-021-00279-5 Pharmacological disruption of the MTDH–SND1 complex enhances tumor antigen presentation and synergizes with anti-PD-1 therapy in metastatic breast cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-021-00280-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-021-00280-y
- adamredwoods 5y agoMetastatic research really needs more funding. It's the true killing mechanism of cancer, and when this can be controlled, metastatic cancer can be classified as a chronic condition, not a terminal one.
- a9h74j 5y ago> “You can’t find a drug target better than this: MTDH is important for most major human cancers, not important for normal cells, and it can be eliminated with no obvious side effects,” said Kang.
- fernly 5y agoSo what is, or are, the "small-molecule inhibitors"? (I don't have access to the full texts of the papers.) Also, what makes them confident these inhibitors "suppress breast cancer progression and metastasis"? Does this mean only in the mouse model? Because the original article says "will be ready for human trials in a few years".
- tux3 5y agoA small molecule is exactly what it says on the tin: small compounds. Small enough that they can pass through cell membranes. Inhibitors block some biological pathway, which in general could be any number of things. In this case the drug blocks a specific protein that we believe cancer cells specifically need, meaning the cancer cells might fail faster than the rest of your body if we inhibit it.
- NKosmatos 5y agoNicely written, well explained and let’s hope that the MTDH will help in suppressing cancer. Not yet available, but their hard work will soon pay out. > “I hope we’ll be ready for clinical trials in human patients in two to three years,”
- nielsbot 5y ago"Because while it’s important to show that mice born without MTDH are resistant to cancer, that doesn’t help patients, whose genes can’t be rewritten." ...yet Wonder if we'll look back at this and think "how quaint".
- csdvrx 5y agoActually, we can: I think we already have working gene therapy for several diseases. Just look at the current list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Treatment_of_genetic_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Treatment_of_gene...
- tsol 5y agoWe don't have the capability to turn off a single gene in all living cells in a body. We have some applications of gene therapy, but they're very specific to the disease they're treating
- moneywoes 5y agoAs someone with some genetic diseases, it’s feels unfortunate to be born too early
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoHuntington's is an invariably fatal disease, which is caused by the repetition of a single gene, which overexpresses a single protein. It's about as simple as genetics get. When we've cured that, I'll say we have working gene therapy.
- yazaddaruvala 5y agoWe don’t have a good enough delivery mechanism to get it to 99.99%+ of cells. So how well a gene therapy is really depends on how many of the cells need to be targeted. For example, increasing muscle mass is beneficial even if it hits only 25% of cells. It can also be injected directly into each large muscle group. Or specifically targeted. Meanwhile, trying to target pancreatic cancer is really hard given it’s location, and depends on if the “bad proteins” would be transported by blood to the pancreas anyways and/or if even 0.01% of cells creating the protein is enough to sustain the problem.
- FundementalBrit 5y agoThe Chinese military are spending vast vast sums on gene therapy. They call it precision medicine.
- nick__m 5y agoPCLX-001 is similar drug in clinical trial that target cancerous cells but spares the healthy one, it's not the same target as the one in the article but I think (I'm not a biologist) that it's a similar mechanism. They even have a test to know beforehand if it's going to be effective in a particular cancer. It's developed by a company named Pacylex. Here's the link to the clinical trial https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04836195?term=pclx-001&draw=2&rank=1 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04836195?term=pclx-00... Edit: removed a duplicated word
- Gedinasay 5y agoI have also heard that proton therapy is very effective in treating cancer. It is the most accurate form of radiological treatment available today. It destroys the primary tumor site without affecting the healthy tissues and organs around the tumor. It is non-invasive and painless and does not affect the patient's quality of life during treatment. Fortunately, some drugs can help treat some forms of cancer, such as fenbendazole. At https://www.fenbenlab.com/product/fenbendazole-capsules-222mg/ https://www.fenbenlab.com/product/fenbendazole-capsules-222m..., you can learn all the information you need about it.
- wetpaws 5y agoctrl+f >in mice
- timbit42 5y ago...and human tissue.
- wetpaws 5y ago>'in a few years'
- timbit42 5y agoNo. You're reading it wrong. It says: "which he can NOW disable, in mice and human tissue, with a targeted experimental treatment that will be ready for human trials in a few years." They have disabled it in human tissue NOW and human trials will be in a few years.
- EMM_386 5y ago> MTDH is important for most major human cancers, not important for normal cells, and it can be eliminated with no obvious side effects I'm not fully buying that. If you look at "Function" on Wikipedia, it seems to have some important roles, including angiogenesis (which is still important outside of cancer). It's not like evolution would select for something that is useless outside of helping cancer. I'd be curious what the side effects are in humans. How can it be claimed that it can be eliminated with "no obvious side effects" when they are still years away from human trials? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTDH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTDH
- tux3 5y agoAngiogenesis is going to be important in wound healing, I suppose, but compared to the current side effects of chemo this seems relatively minor. I agree that "no obvious side effects" seems excessive if you interpret that as the expected result in humans. Still, on paper this looks much more specific that anything we have.
- techdragon 5y agoThats a pretty important consideration here. If I was looking at chemotherapy & its side effects vs alternatives... the side effect list from these angiogenesis inhibitors looks a lot more focused, the sort of thing you can develop a focused regime around the monitoring and management of.
- majkinetor 5y agoConsidering that people still get prescribed Thalidomide to limit angiogenesis as a cancer treatment, and we know about its side effects (lets ignore birth defects for now), I see no particular difference with this drug.
- majkinetor 5y agoNo obvious side effects in mice with knockout gene and using the drug. The drug doesn't disable the gene but make the protein unable to do its function by preventing the binding with another protein. If it can make cancer chronic disease, any side effects it may have will probably be less important then death.
- alexk307 5y agoFascinating that they have to physically screen individual molecules one at a time to see if they can bind with a specific protein. Even at a Princeton lab, it took years. Are there other institutions/companies working in this space?
- xiphias2 5y agoWhat takes years to develop for the human trials to start? Is it about optimizing the delivery system, or finding the right targets to test on in bigger animals first? There are so many people closecto dying in cancer, that finding volunteers for a Phase 1 test should be easy.
- coffeemug 5y agoAcquiring endless regulatory approvals.
- droopyEyelids 5y agoI wonder how much of our regulation around medicine is wasteful, vs regulation that came about in response to some sort of malfeasance.
- AlchemistCamp 5y agoMost of it is probably both.
- ok_dad 5y agoI worked in medical devices, and that is correct. Much of the work I did in the QA dept would not have improved the product or safety, but some of it clearly did. Can't say for medicines, as they had a different set of regs from devices.
- rackjack 5y agoIt is both. The last time we had very free experimentation (read: disregard for human life and suffering) we got the Nazis, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, MKUltra, etc.. So institutions swung strongly in the opposite direction (the visible ones, at least), giving us Institutional Review Boards and such. The balance is impossible to get right either way, hence the need for Right to Try and so on.
- adamredwoods 5y ago
- taftster 5y agoIf we can get some new tools for the fight against cancer in the next few decades, this will be just so huge. It feels like we're right on the edge of this possibility. Now if we can just avoid the red tape along the way.
- thomasjudge 5y agoSo, not a scientist here, and I know this is not their research direction, but would a gene therapy be possible using something like CRISPR to just "edit out" the MTDH gene? I know we are kind of in early days for that..
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoWe’ll all be well dead before this becomes available to us.
- perl4ever 5y ago"MTDH was amplified — meaning it produced MTDH proteins at abnormally high levels compared to normal cells — in 30 to 40% of tumor samples" That doesn't sound great, unless the 30-40% was only and all of the metastatic type. My cynicism leads me to think if the news was that good, they would clearly state it. Also, I read this: "for some, maybe five, 10, 15, 20 years later, they’ll have a recurrence, often as metastatic relapse" ...and think, so how long does it take to prove that you've prevented this, huh?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- danachow 5y agoCuring 30 to 40% of a population is still a big win.
- headmelted 5y agoDoes it even mean this though? If you’ve attacked 30%-40% of the tumours in each patient, no-one is cured.
- danachow 5y agoYes, this is what it means. Why does everybody here assume everyone outside the software profession is an idiot. Obviously if it only attacked 30% of tumor cells it would be useless. I'm not going to go over the physiology of cancer here, but basically yes targeted therapy works because of the common progeny of cancer cells.
- perl4ever 5y ago>Why does everybody here assume everyone outside the software profession is an idiot Why does everybody here assume everyone here is a SV software engineer, except for them? You could be insulting someone in high school. Cancer affects people from every walk of life, so there's a good chance a random non-medical person in a thread like this has some experience that they are drawing on, like seeing a family member die up close and interacting with oncologists. >Obviously if it only attacked 30% of tumor cells it would be useless I think both of you made up things that weren't actually stated. It didn't say that 30-40% would be cured or that 30-40% of the tumors would be eliminated.
- Gedinasay 5y agoI have also heard that proton therapy is very effective in treating cancer.