Cancer cells carry a lot of genetic hiccups that can help them outgrow normal surrounding tissue. Now, researchers have developed an anti-cancer strategy that takes advantage of these glitches, rather than try to correct them.
In a proof-of-principle study published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology, a collaborative team at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center describe a new strategy, tested in mice and lab dishes, that uses lab-designed molecules to insert a kill switch into cancer cells — but leave healthy cells unscathed.
“We showed that we can engineer a therapy in response to the internal state of a cell,” said Hutch computational biologist Dr. Robert Bradley, who co-led the project. “We believe that we can use this exact approach to deliver therapies in a highly specific manner, even outside of the context that we focused on for our study.”
Bradley, who holds the McIlwain Family Endowed Chair in Data Science, teamed up with MSK cancer geneticist Dr. Omar Abdel-Wahab to develop and test the novel strategy.
“This kind of approach and concept is completely new,” said Abdel-Wahab. “That’s the most exciting part of it: It’s a whole new concept as well as a new form of therapy.”
