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MIT Researchers Develop Triple Helix MicroRNA Cancer Treatment (mit.edu)

Posted by Soulskill on from the might-assimilate-you-by-mistake dept.

Eloking sends a report on new research from MIT, where scientists have developed a promising technique to shrink cancerous tumors. By "twisting RNA strands into a triple helix and embedding them in a biocompatible gel," they were able to efficiently deliver the RNA to tumor cells. "Using this technique, the researchers dramatically improved cancer survival rates by simultaneously turning on a tumor-suppressing microRNA and de-activating one that causes cancer. They believe their approach could also be used for delivering other types of RNA, as well as DNA and other therapeutic molecules. ... Once placed on the tumor, the gel slowly releases microRNA-dendrimer particles, which are absorbed into the tumor cells. After the particles enter the cells, enzymes cut each triple helix into three separate microRNA strands."

29 comments

  1. Triple Helix by Flavianoep · · Score: 1

    I wonder what does "twisting RNA strands into a triple helix" looks like without use of contraptions that grab it from both ends and then twist it like a peace of cloth.

    --
    Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
    1. Re:Triple Helix by fulldecent · · Score: 1

      It looks like magnetism. The shit just collects, snaps on and builds up. The twisting and the angles are a result of the geometry that the local sets of molecules want to connect at.

      --

      -- I was raised on the command line, bitch

    2. Re:Triple Helix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Came here for the "we're going to five helixes" comment...

  2. Slashdot write up by bytesex · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Once placed on the tumor, the gel slowly releases microRNA-dendrimer particles, which are absorbed into the tumor cells. After the particles enter the cells, enzymes cut each triple helix into three separate microRNA strands."

    And? Aaaand?!... The suspense is just killing me! For Pete's sake man - just tell me what happens next!

    --
    Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
    1. Re:Slashdot write up by Nidi62 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "Once placed on the tumor, the gel slowly releases microRNA-dendrimer particles, which are absorbed into the tumor cells. After the particles enter the cells, enzymes cut each triple helix into three separate microRNA strands."

      And? Aaaand?!... The suspense is just killing me! For Pete's sake man - just tell me what happens next!

      Science. Science happens.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    2. Re:Slashdot write up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      killall -9 cancer

    3. Re:Slashdot write up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My (very very uneducated) guess is that the said single mircoRNA strands constitute the medicine, and that a single microRNA strand is difficult to get into the cancerous cell by traditional means. By delivering it as a triple-helix (which sounds unusual and may have unusual chemistry) some mechanism let's it slip more easily into cancer cells where it is then cut into single strands by enzymes, thus delivering the medicine(?).

    4. Re:Slashdot write up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A glowing eye, Halle Berry looking, human-alien hybrid baby mummy is created.

    5. Re:Slashdot write up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And thus begins the zombie apocalypse... :)

    6. Re:Slashdot write up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Orly?

      Your's truly,
      God

    7. Re:Slashdot write up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, what happens next depends upon how intelligent you are.

      If you're intelligent, then you click on the link and RTFA. If not, then you just make an ass out of yourself by posting a dumb comment.

      I see which course you tacked.

  3. Hope by JimSadler · · Score: 2

    Things are looking brighter for a cure for cancers and I love it. What will it be like to live in a world in which friends and family are not ripped apart by this awful disease? Now can we get this treatment into the hands of every person that needs it or must the poor die even though a cure exists?

    1. Re:Hope by jimtheowl · · Score: 1

      Overpopulation + 1?

    2. Re:Hope by Eloking · · Score: 1

      Overpopulation + 1?

      About this, I'll bring one of my answer to a similar statement about the fear of overpopulation.

      I actually want to start this argument.

      What is the problem with "overpopulation" How do you define it?

      Is a planet overpopulated because we can't produce enough food for everyone? About this, here's a conceptual 21th centory farming tower : http://www.popsci.com/cliff-ku...

      With this, you can produce food for 50k people with a 30 story tower. So, unless I make a huge mistake somewhere, it's untrue that the earth can only produce food for 10 or so billion people.

      Or is it the pollution and the destruction of the nature? I am going to say something really sad here, but will humanity really need nature to survive in the 22th century? A good image is the planet Coruscant from the Star Wars franchise, the planet is one big city, nothing else. Yeah it's sad and I love nature too, but there's tech to remove our dependency of mother nature.

      Or is it the pollution and the global warming? Well, there is something to be worried. But I'm a optimist one. The reason why we are slow to fight global warming is mostly an economical one. But guess what, one of the first city to drown will be New York with a estimated GMP over a trillion dollars. So I think that, soon enough, there'll suddenly a lot more money available to fight global warming (Well, "soon" is a long shot since the sea is rising a few millimetres each years). And I also have faith in new green tech on the way to help us out.

      --
      Elok
    3. Re:Hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Now can we get this treatment into the hands of every person that needs it or must the poor die even though a cure exists?

      A very noble feeling, and I say that without a whiff of sarcasm. Thing is, poor people are dying of other things: hunger, war, criminality... all of them having to do with our (the rich people's) indifference :-(

    4. Re:Hope by jimtheowl · · Score: 1

      I believe in optimism, but think that the problems are enormous. Scenes from movies are not solutions, and no one is building self sustaining cities or story towers for everyone else out of good will alone.

      I'm also all for extending life and eradicating disease, but we have a lot of issues to work out.

      As for covering the planet, that is a horrible thought.

      "I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the
      properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
      It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
      they can fit twice as many in the same building site."

      - Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Phil Collins, Steven Hackett and Michael Rutherford)

    5. Re:Hope by Eloking · · Score: 1

      I believe in optimism, but think that the problems are enormous. Scenes from movies are not solutions, and no one is building self sustaining cities or story towers for everyone else out of good will alone.

      I'm also all for extending life and eradicating disease, but we have a lot of issues to work out.

      As for covering the planet, that is a horrible thought.

      "I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the

      properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.

      It's said now that people will be shorter in height,

      they can fit twice as many in the same building site."

      - Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Anthony Banks, Phil Collins, Steven Hackett and Michael Rutherford)

      Funny that you criticize my reference in a movie but use a reference from a song yourself in the same post. And to be clear here, I've used that reference to illustrate my thoughts, they weren't based on it. And no matter how we hate it, it's probably where we're heading unless humanity get wiped out.

      As for saving the world on goodwill. No but money is. And when, in the future, we'll reach the limit of traditional farming while the demand continue to grow, the consequence will be the grow of the value of food. And when this will happen, those "pricey food tower building" will become a lot more interesting for investors.

      In my mind, the real problem is the energy production. If humanity continue to grow, we'll need better (and cleaner) way to produce a "lot" of energy. I have my hope on fusion and/or solar space station, but it's a long shot.

      --
      Elok
    6. Re:Hope by jimtheowl · · Score: 1

      Fine by me that you use a movie as a reference to express a thought. To be specific, I don't believe that one illustrates a solution. Cut down the trees and we now have to produce our own oxygen, filter our own air and water. The structures themselves require maintenance; we are creating more problems and complexity. By the time we are that advanced we might as well be in space. Overpopulation precedes that.

      In my reference, I was also alluding to the fact that these are not new ideas, and they lead to a minefield of other issues.

      Yes we need to solve the energy problem to go further, perhaps produce food directly from it in the near future. But I don't believe that we need to destroy the planet and the ecosystem to do so. We would be wise to use the technology you mention to reduce our footprint and re-establish a balance.

      In that respect I am perhaps more optimistic than you are.

    7. Re:Hope by erapert · · Score: 1

      Now can we get this treatment into the hands of every person that needs it or must the poor die even though a cure exists?

      Noble.

      There's a town in an oasis surrounded by desert. Two hundred people live there. A hundred of the people work diligently at their farms and reap just enough food to feed themselves; the other hundred are either extremely unlucky, or indolent, or foolish in their labours and do not raise enough food to feed themselves.

      Taking food from those who have it can be stretched to a point; perhaps enough to barely feed a hundred and fifty but not enough to feed everyone.
      What is the correct course of action? What is justice?

      Starve everyone so that everyone feels good and noble?

      For those who were unlucky some food should be shared-- there's not so many of them that sharing would bring ruin upon all if these next two categories had done their part...
      But did the indolent not have their own farms? Should they not have worked their own farms to feed themselves?
      For the fools whose labours were insufficient or wasted: should they not have been more diligent about something so important?

      At a certain point diving in to try and save a drowning man will not save him but will also drown a hero.

      If possible then a cure should be shared, but just as the cure arrives too late to save the billions who have already died it has also arrived too late to save those who have not the means to purchase as soon as it comes off the assembly line. The mathematics of supply, demand, and value do not care about virtue signalling nor real compassion. Let's not capsize our economic boat from pointless histrionics.

    8. Re:Hope by wasteoid · · Score: 1

      It's only 5 years away ...

    9. Re: Hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just a quick comment: most of our oxygen comes from the oceans, not trees.

    10. Re:Hope by silentcoder · · Score: 1

      There's just one problem with your story. That indolent society ? Has literally never existed. It's entirely a fantasy of the extreme economic right. Ayn Rand cultists happilly embrace the fantasy that basically everybody else is a lazy moocher.

      Reality just doesn't agree. Study after study after study has consistently proven the opposite to be true - people hate not being busy. That's why under universal income schemes employment consistently goes *up* - people who suddenly have enough money to live on without having to work keep working, and the ones who weren't invest in education so they can get jobs, some start businesses. Actual productivity goes up and per-individual it declines a mere 9% (nearly all of which is invested in either childcare or further education).

      The fantasy has no basis in reality.

      That said - progress is not a result of productivity (at least, not as measured in "hard work"). By that measure the most productive people on earth are also, consistently, the poorest. The people who need to work the hardest just to survive.
      No, progress is the reward of laziness.

      Once somebody was too lazy to go gathering fruit - and planted trees right outside his shelter and invented farming. Once, somebody was too lazy to carry heavy stuff around anymore and invented the wheel to make it easier. Once somebody was too lazy to hunt and started domesticating livestock.
      But even moreso - time not spent on having to work is where the non-obvious progress starts.
      The pattern persists, as a software engineer - I specialize in automation of build and deployment systems. I've built a career out of being too lazy to ever do the same process twice. If I have to do it more than once, I write code to do it for me in future. Which means that it always ends up being done predictably without risk of human error interfering.

      I used semi-metaphoric examples above, now I'll cite one for which the archeological evidence is overwhelming (just to show my conjectures above aren't based on nothing). About 11-thousand years ago, people settled in the fertile crescent reached a level of farming where for the first time they produced enough extra food that they had to build a kind of building never needed before: a grain store. They had lots of free time because a little farming once a season would feed them the whole year. They then proceeded to do something nobody had done before - with all that free time they start caring about a pursuit with no apparent survival value at all: the aesthetics of their homes. These people invented the first plaster. The plaster they invented was made from limestone. Making limestone plaster requires keeping that limestone at a heat level of around 1000 degrees celcius consistently for many days. To do that, they had to go way beyond "fire" and take our ability to control fire to an entirely new and unprecedented level.
      And not long after, those techniques would form the cornerstone of an entire new industry which would change the world forever: smelting and smithing.

      The techniques they developed and the time they "wasted" just to not have mud-colored walls - would be the key to change the stone age into the bronze age and later the iron age.
      All because they had lots of free time, and nothing much to do with it.

      In the real world - your first society would still be scrabbling to produce barely enough to survive ten-thousand years later, while their neighbours will be building aeroplanes by then. We have plenty of examples of that as well. In harsher climates where the energy yield from available food is low, domesticable animals are rare or non-existent and it takes enormous effort and ingenuity to survive, all the effort and inguinuity goes into just surviving. There is nothing left for progress, and ten thousand years later they still have to chop down an entire tree and spend days mulching it to get enough food to do the next one, because they have never had the resources to overproduce enough to be able ot be lazy.

      Laziness as you think

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  4. And Thus the Zombie Plague has begun... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When shit like this escapes the lab

  5. Yep by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Of course they have. Carter got a "new breakthrough med too" ...Medical Marijuana is on the rise. People are finding out it cures cancer.(http://www.cureyourowncancer.org/rick-simpson.html) So of course, get out the cancer fixes quick big pharma.

  6. Assholes who don't know how to RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    FYI - It is all explained here:

    http://news.mit.edu/2015/microrna-shrink-tumor-cancer-treatment-1207

  7. Fuck it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... we're going for FIVE helixes!

  8. Will this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    treatment cure my autism?

  9. Screw triple-helix... by Hirsch · · Score: 1

    I'm working on a sextuple-helix ultra-micro-QNA therapy!

  10. So.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Magic?