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Cancer. BOOM! What cancer?

Posted in SPLOG to Word by Justine Fein-Bursoni on Monday, August 30, 2010 at 5:09 pm

Paul J. Hergenrother, a professor of chemistry at the UIUC and other researchers have identified a compound that causes cancer cells to self-destruct, Inspector Gadget style. The sooner they can figure out how to make this happen — the better. The article was taken straight from today's TheNation.com post:

      "Compound that causes cancer cells to self-destruct identified: Study"

Scientists have identified a small synthetic compound that causes cancer cells to self destruct, throwing up promise of effective and personalised anti-cancer treatment in the future.

Most living cells contain a protein called procaspase-3 which, when activated, changes into the executioner enzyme caspase-3 and initiates programmed cell death called apoptosis.

In cancer cells, however, the signalling pathway to procaspase-3 is broken. As a result cancer cells escape destruction and grow into tumours.

Paul J. Hergenrother, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and other researchers identified a synthetic compound that directly activates procaspase-3 and induces apoptosis, reported science portal EurekAlert.

The researchers screened more than 20,000 structurally diverse compounds and found that the compound called PAC-1 (procaspase activating compound one) killed cancer cells in 23 tumours obtained from a local hospital.

The researchers tested the compound's efficacy in cell cultures and in three mouse models of cancer.

"This is the first in what could be a host of organic compounds with the ability to directly activate executioner enzymes," Hergenrother said.

"By bypassing the broken pathway, we can use the cells' own machinery to destroy themselves," he said.

"The potential effectiveness of compounds such as PAC-1 could also be predicted in advance and patients could be selected for treatment based on the amount of procaspase-3 found in their tumour cells."

Such personalized medicine strategies are preferential to therapies that rely on general cytotoxins, the researchers say, and could be the future of anti-cancer therapy.

Many cancer treatments use cytotoxins to kill the actively and rapidly dividing cancer cells.

2 comments

username

ibx33

08/31/10 at 08:51
#1

This is awesome.

Annie Weisner avatar featured_post

Annie Weisner

08/31/10 at 08:32
#2

Sorry to be the downer here, but this doesn’t say anything about preventing apoptosis in healthy cells.  Apoptosis has this unfortunate tendency to trigger more apoptosis, so that’s the danger here.  They’ve still got to figure out how to target cancer cells and prevent the treatment from causing massive cell death throughout the body.  We’re still a long way from turning this discovery into a treatment for cancer.

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