smart bomb. The hybrid molecule finds its way into this prostate cancer mass and collects on the cancer cell surfaces.
cancer researchers have long sought an alternative treatment to chemotherapy that can destroy tumors without damaging the rest of the body. A new study with mice and human tumors may put such a handy treatment.
design drugs to target cancer is a challenge because cancer cells are well camouflaged in healthy tissue. But researchers have begun to find molecular beacons unique to cancer cells. Last year, Wadih Arap and Renata Pasqualini, a husband and wife team of cancer biologists to Mr. Anderson Cancer Center D. at the University of Texas, Houston, have identified a protein called GRP78 expressed by cancer cells prostate and not healthy tissue. They knew they had found a promising therapeutic target because GRP78 is expressed on the cell surface where it is easily accessible to drugs. In addition, a targeted drug for GRP78 should be unlikely to attack healthy cells because GRP78 is a so-called stress response protein that is expressed only on the surface of cells under stressful conditions such as those that occur in the mass oxygen deficient tumor.
to test GRP78 as a target, a team led by Pasqualini and Arap designed a short chain of amino acids that binds specifically to the surface of the GRP78 protein. They then merged this system to a small protein corkscrew shape when internalized, triggers the cell to commit suicide. The team hopes that the hybrid molecule would act as a search missile tumor when injected into the bloodstream.
The missile appears to be deadly accurate. Reporting in the September issue of Cancer cell , the team shows that its localized hybrid molecule and destroys human prostate tumors transplanted into mice without harming other tissue type. He did the same for breast tumors. The next step, says Arap and Pasqualini, is a series of preclinical studies to determine its safety for clinical trials in humans.
During the last decade, Arap and Pasqualini have developed a "smart bomb" approach to cancer therapy, said Bruce Zetter, cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston. This study "shows how we are" to put the strategy into action.
Related Sites
The site of Wadih Arap
The site of Renata Pasqualini
laboratory site Bruce Zetter
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