A 16
year old Indian origin boy from UK’s Surrey has claimed to have found a
treatment for the most deadly form of breast cancer. He thinks he has devised a
way to turn the triple negative breast cancer into a kind which responds to
drugs. Around 7,500 women each year diagnosed with triple negative breast
cancer, a type of disease which does not respond to today’s most effective
drugs. Many breast cancers are driven by oestrogen, progesterone or growth
chemicals, so drugs that can block those fuels, such as tamoxifen, make
effective treatments. Most cancers have receptors on their surface which bind
to drugs, but triple negative don’t have receptors so the drugs don’t work. Thus,
it can be only treated with a combination of surgery, radiation and
chemotherapy which lowers chances of survival.
Researchers
have found that some women with triple negative cancer respond very well to
treatment while others quickly decline. The problem lies in whether the cancer
cells are “differentiated” or not. Differentiated means they look more like
healthy cells and tend to grow and multiply quite slowly, and are less
aggressive. However, when cancer cells are “undifferentiated” they get stuck in
a dangerous primitive form, never turning into recognizable breast tissue, and
spreading quickly, leading to high-grade tumours. The teenager said, “The goal
is to turn the cancer back to a state where it can be treated. The ID4 protein
stops undifferentiated stem cell cancers from differentiating, so you have to
block ID4 to allow the cancer to differentiate.”
According
to him, the solution lies in upping the activity of tumour suppressor gene
called PTEN, which allows chemotherapy to work more effectively, soothe dual
treatment could prove far more effective than traditional drugs. He plans to
deliver the therapy in a nanoparticles containing RNA – the messenger molecule
which carries instructions from the DNA. The RNA nanoparticles would be encoded
to silence or boost gene activity.
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