BREAKTHROUGH IN TREATING BREAST CANCER In the treatment of breast cancer, the common chemotherapy drug called Paclitaxel or Taxol wipes out the bulk of tumour cells, but leave behind a tumour cell making machinery in cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells resist conventional treatment, and may explain why many cancers grow back after chemotherapy. US researchers have now found a chemical that can kill cancer stem cells, and could pave the way for a far easier cure for cancer. "There is a lot of evidence to suggest now that these cells are responsible for many of the recurrences that are observed after treatment has stopped," said Piyush Gupta of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute, whose study appears in the journal Cell.

 

The problem is that cancer stem cells are rare and difficult to study in the lab because they quickly change into other types of cells. And they are hard to kill. To study the cells, Gupta's team first devised a method for stabilizing cancer stem cells in the lab and getting them to multiply. They then tested them against 16 000 natural and commercial chemical compounds to see which ones were able to kill the cancer stem cells specifically. A chemical called salinomycin hit the target. It was 100 times more potent at killing breast cancer stem cells than paclitaxel or Taxol. Cancer stem cells treated with salinomycin were far less able to start breast cancers when injected into mice than cancer stem cells treated by paclitaxel. And the treatment also appeared to slow the growth of tumours in the mice.

Gupta said it is not clear if salinomycin will emerge as the best drug compound for killing breast cancer stem cells -- or that it will be safe to use in people with cancer.
But the study offers a new roadmap for drug companies to isolate and test compounds capable of killing the cells.
"We now have an approach that can be used very systematically to find such compounds," he said.

Ultimately, he said it may be possible to treat cancers with dual therapies that wipe out the bulk of tumour cells and the tumour-cell making machinery many conventional treatments leave behind.

Kader Khan
Editor
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