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Thinking Critically - A very clever approach to cancer treatment

Sometimes I am just astounded by the cleverness of medical researchers.

Sometimes I am just astounded by the cleverness of medical researchers.

On September 29, scientists in a joint biomedical engineering program between North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill unveiled a promising new technique in the battle against cancer in an article published in the journal Advanced Marterials.

The technique involves two existing cancer drugs, which have proven effective in treating cancer tumours, TRAIL and doxorubicin (Dox). TRAIL attacks the membranes of cancer cells while Dox kills their nuclei.

The only problem with these drugs was they don’t last very long in the bloodstream because patients’ immune system identifies them as foreign objects.

If only there was a way to trick the body into thinking the medicine belongs.

Now there is.

The North Carolina researchers took blood from mice and collected platelets from it. They isolated the platelet membranes and placed them in a solution with a Dox gel. The solution is compressed creating nanoscale (a billionth of a metre) spheres of Dox-gel with a platelet membrane. The surface is then coated with TRAIL.

Clever, right?

The resulting compound circulated in the mice for 30 hours compared to six hours in the non-treated drugs.

Obviously, with more time to work, one would expect more effective treatment. It gets even, though. Cancer cells and blood platelets have a natural affinity for one another, i.e., they stick together.

Once they are bound, the TRAIL goes to work on the cancer cell membrane exposing the nucleus. The cancer nucleus attacks the platelet membrane releasing the Dox, which kills the cancer.

In mice, this new delivery system was much more effective in dealing with large tumours. Furthermore, it attacked tumour cells circulating in the bloodstream possibly slowing or preventing the cancer from metastasizing.

Of course, there is still more pre-clinical testing to be done before human trials, but it is progress.

Also, because this is a technique as opposed to a drug, it could have application for other conditions such as delivery of cardiovascular drugs.

Meanwhile, there is a growing push toward anti-aging research, the concept being the risk of all kinds of diseases including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s increase with age.

Researchers believe slowing or reversing the aging process may be our best defence against these other individual conditions and are lobbying to have aging treated as a disease, which would open up funding opportunities for this relatively new, yet exceptionally old quest for eternal youth.

It is an amazing and bold new world out there. Some days it feels like just about anything is possible.