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Cancer News

Study suggests new way to attack resistant tumours

Thursday 14 July 2011

UK scientists have shown that a particular group of chemotherapy drugs work by causing an unusual form of cell death in cancer cells, called necroptosis.

Until recently, scientists thought that most cancer cell death caused by treatment happened through a process called apoptosis. This process is often blocked in cancer cells - leading them to resist treatment and grow and spread.

Now, scientists at the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) have shown that some cancer treatments use necroptosis to kill cancer cells that are resistant to the usual process of cell death.

The scientists made this new discovery while trying to work out how a class of chemotherapy drugs called topoisomerase inhibitors kill cancer cells.

Cancer cells dying through the newly-discovered process of necroptosis. 
When the cells die in this way they lose their membrane integrity and take up red dye, turning them red.

During necroptosis, a number of key proteins are switched on, leading the cells to lose their membrane integrity and self-destruct.

Lab tests revealed that it is possible to switch on these proteins and initiate this unusual process of cell death.

Because necroptosis rarely happens in healthy cells, it may be possible to develop new drugs that encourage cancer cells to die, while leaving surrounding healthy tissue unharmed.

One such drug, which switches on one of the key proteins involved in necroptosis, is already in existence and is currently undergoing clinical testing.

Study author Professor Pascal Meier, whose findings are published in the journal Molecular Cell, said: "These findings represent a new line of attack in the fight against cancer.

"Chemotherapy has been around for decades but we have never understood how it kills cancer cells. This work shows not only that it can happen by two different processes, but how drugs can be developed to activate this newly discovered second cell-killing process in a much smarter, more effective way.

"We are at an early stage with this work but it could represent a new way of thinking about how we treat cancer patients in the future."

Oliver Childs, Cancer Research UK's senior science information officer, said: "It's very encouraging to see work like this, which helps scientists understand exactly how some cancer drugs kill tumour cells.

"But this work is at an early stage, and a long way off from being translated into new ways to treat cancer. The next step is to use this knowledge to improve treatments for cancer patients."

Reference

  • Tenev, T., Bianchi, K., Darding, M., Broemer, M., Langlais, C., Wallberg, F., Zachariou, A., Lopez, J., MacFarlane, M., Cain, K., & Meier, P. (2011). The Ripoptosome, a Signaling Platform that Assembles in Response to Genotoxic Stress and Loss of IAPs Molecular Cell DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2011.06.006
 
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