New Drug Research shows cancer stem cells not invulnerable

A promising new cancer drug targets and kills the pernicious tumour cells responsible for metastasis and relapse. It is far too early to test the drug, called salinomycin, in humans, but the findings offer hope that the so-called cancer stem cells will eventually prove vulnerable to treatment.

"It's been thought that these cells are responsible both for metastasis and for recurrence following anti-cancer therapy," says Piyush Gupta, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the new study. "There's been a lot of evidence to suggest that cancer stem cells are resistant to a variety of cell-death-inducing agents."

Gupta's team found that salinomycin kills breast-cancer stem cells at least 100 times more effectively than another popular anti-cancer drug. And mice implanted with human breast-cancer cells and later treated with salinomycin showed fewer signs of metastases than mice given a standard cancer therapy. Click here for More....

H5N1 Pandemic Flu - breakthrough research

From my previous article on the H5N1 Pandemic flu virus, you will know that the flu virus constantly alters its surface proteins and constantly mutates into variant forms. This means that we can be infected many times over a lifetime and a flu vaccine made last year has but a short period of effectiveness.

Now studies show that this behaviour is just a decoy to guard the virus's more vulnerable parts; a fact that might enable us to make drugs, or a vaccine, that will work on all kinds of flu, year after year.

Flu's main surface protein, haemagglutinin, looks like a lollipop. Our immune systems mostly produce antibodies to its rounded head, and it is this part that changes every year, making immunity short-lived. But in a large library of human antibodies, Wayne Marasco at Harvard University and colleagues found very few that bind its "stalk", which barely changes at all, either through time or between different flu viruses.

To see if this might provide a way to attack the virus, they produced large amounts of the antibodies that home in on the stalk and found that they cured and protected mice from two kinds of H5N1 bird flu, as well as many other flu families including H1N1 pandemic and ordinary flu. The researchers now want to develop the antibodies as a flu drug, possibly to stockpile for pandemics.

The team also plans to test the stalk antibody as a vaccine, so that people produce more of these antibodies themselves. They suspect haemagglutinin's big head is a decoy aimed to attract the immune system's attention and to stop us making many antibodies to the stalk – a delicate bit of molecular machinery that not be so easy to change to evade our immune attacks. In tests on mice, they found that the flu viruses did not evolve to escape the treatment.

Another benefit is that such antibodies stay effective for more than three weeks when injected into people, and in a pandemic could keep people alive long enough to produce their own antibodies to the virus.