Suffocating the cancer cells by depriving oxygen supply might be the new aid in cancer therapy. MPI-P did creative visualization of the newly developed method of cancer therapy.
Cancer treatment is a long-term process due to the remnants of existing cancer cells, which often adapt into an aggressive shape, becoming untreatable.
However, cancer treatment plans usually involve numerous drug combinations and /or radiation therapy for cancer relapse prevention.
Today's modern drugs have been developed to combat all types of cancer cells, targeting a specific
Biochemical processes differ in every type of cell.
But cancer cells are extremely adaptive and can create mechanisms that can avoid the effects of the treatment.
Developing a medical treatment for fighting cancer is a major topic of world research. Scientists Tanja Weil and David Ng from Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) look closely at cancer's countermeasures and aim to stop them.
Suffocation of Cancer Cells
MPI-P group leader David Ng said that they want to prevent the adaptation of cancer "by invading the main pillar of cellular life" -how cells breathe- and taking up oxygen to produce chemical energy to grow. Disrupting the cellular components responsible for oxygen conversion into chemical energy, they have illustrated the initial success of eliminating cells derived from untreatable metastatic cancer.
The research team has produced a synthetic drug that will travel into cells where it shows reaction to some conditions that can be found inside and will trigger a chemical system.
They are allowing the drug's molecules to bind and create tiny hairs that are a thousand times thinner than a human's hair.
Zhixuan Zhou, the first author of the paper and Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow, said that "those" hairs are fluorescent that are not visible to the human eye, and their formation can be seen directly under a microscope, according to the study abstract.
These scientists monitored oxygen consumption in the different types of cells, and they figured out that the hair stops all of them from converting oxygen into an ATP molecule. ATP is a molecule that is responsible for delivering energy to cells.
Further Studies in Future
The same process worked even for those cells derived from untreatable metastatic cancer. As a result, the cancer cells die quickly, not longer than four hours.
The scientists hope that they can derive a new way to treat up-to-now untreatable cancer after some continuous years of research.
Doctor Weil and Doctor Ng, alongside their team, have shown amazing results under controlled laboratory culture. They promise to prevail in unraveling deeper insights because these thin hairs can hinder oxygen conversion to chemical energy.
These objects could further develop in the future and can be manipulated to authorize other cellular processes to address other life-threatening diseases.
The collaborative study was recently published in the renowned Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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