Scientists have developed targeted chemotherapy that can kill tumors

Researchers at City of Hope have developed a new type of targeted chemotherapy that can kill solid tumors according to preclinical research and it could be a game-changer. 

The researchers published their work in a new study explaining how they took a protein once thought to be too difficult for targeted therapy and developed destroy it while not harming healthy cells. 

Proliferating cell nuclear antigen was the protein in question and the scientists designed a new drug to target it. However, the science behind it is far more complicated than that. 

Study lead author Long Gu explained that proliferating cell nuclear antigen was thought to be “undruggable” as a targeted therapeutic but City of Hope was able to achieve it. 

Most therapies in use today use only a single pathway to destroy tumors and this allows some cancer types to mutate according to Linda Malkas, one of the study’s co-authors.

Photo Credit: Twitter @cityofhope

Malkas and her fellow researchers developed a small molecule they’ve called AOH1996 and it differs from other cancer therapeutics because of the unique way it targets PCNA. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

AOH1996 is delivered in pill form and in order to understand how it works you first need to know why proliferating cell nuclear antigen is significant in the body see well as what it does. 

Proliferating cell nuclear antigen plays a critical role in replicating DNA and it repairs the pathways that ensure the stability of our genome according to ACD Publications. 

"PCNA is like a major airline terminal hub containing multiple plane gates,” Malkas said in a press release on the research, adding that it was “uniquely altered in cancer cells.”

It was this unique alteration in PCNA that allowed the researchers to design a drug that could specifically target the protein but only when it was in its cancer form, Malkas said. 

“Our cancer-killing pill is like a snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells," Malkas explained in a statement. 

The initial results from the drug's preclinical research have been promising and it looks like AOH1996 can suppress tumors in animal models based on the preliminary results.

The research team at City of Hope is beginning Phase 1 of clinical trials on humans and that means this cancer-killing pill could someday be on the market if it proves effective.

The press release on the new research noted that City of Hope’s new cancer drug can treat a wide variety of cancers—including “breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin and lung cancers.”

City of Hope’s new cancer drug was found to weaken cancer cells and this made other chemical agents like the chemotherapy drug cisplatin more effective, which could mean AOH1996 would be useful in combined therapies according to the press release. 

“By targeting PCNA, we are inhibiting the complex machinery to stop cellular growth and proliferation. This is a new way of trying to kill cancer cells or at least to slow it down,” explained Dr. Vincent Chung in a separate press release from City of Hope.