New Anti-Cancer Drug Put Cancers To Sleep In Mice -- Permanently (medicalxpress.com)

"Australian scientists have taken a 'major step forward' in the world of cancer research," reports ABC (the national broadcaster of Australia). Long-time Slashdot reader Artem Tashkinov quotes an announcement from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research: In a world first, Melbourne scientists have discovered a new type of anti-cancer drug that can put cancer cells into a permanent sleep, without the harmful side-effects caused by conventional cancer therapies.

Published today in the journal Nature, the research reveals the first class of anti-cancer drugs that work by putting the cancer cell to sleep -- arresting tumour growth and spread without damaging the cells' DNA.

The new class of drugs could provide an exciting alternative for people with cancer, and has already shown great promise in halting cancer progression in models of blood and liver cancers, as well as in delaying cancer relapse.
One of the lead researchers says the new compounds "had already shown great promise in preclinical testing."

Comments

Who has the count?

[moehoward]

Didn't we all hire someone here on Slashdot to keep track of all the miracle cancer cures? This may have been in the late 90's.

Number of cancer cures announced in stories on Slashdot >= Number of flying-car-coming-tomorrow stories on Slashdot

Maybe it was me who we hired. I forget. I may have been the one who was supposed to keep track of the Alzheimer cure stories.

Re:Who has the count?

[moehoward]

Have you SEEN the battery capacity of the Gigafactory?

Re:Who has the count?

[hAckz0r]

Not so fast. Switching off all cells in the body from creating new cells, while it will certainly retard the cancers ability to proliferate, when ALL cells stop dividing you are essentially at the end-game of life. "No new cells" == "dying". They still need to identify which cells need killing before they can allow everything to be switched back on, until then you are in a physical decline and unable to repair any new injuries. The drug is merely delaying the inevitable problem long enough that personalized genetic analysis and custom cures may then be possible.

Re:Big Pharma will sell for one million

[olsmeister]

Well I would assume you could always select the cheaper treatments if that's what you wanted, and deal with the side effects and higher risk of dying.

Re:Big Pharma will sell for one million

[Anonymous Coward]

How was the research funded?

University (Monash) research discovered it. If it was funded with Australian government funding, how does Australia treat that?

Universal anticancer

[manu0601]

What is remarkable is that they claim to target any cancer. Cancer is hard to cure because it is as diverse as people.

TFA says they induced senescence - the lack of ability to divide - to cancer cells, but they do not tell us how they managed to target cancer cells only.

Re:Universal anticancer

[Cinnamon Beige]

Welp, I'd only moderated a bit but...I'm not buying the article, so I'm going to have to stick to the abstract, which should have enough to answer the important questions.

The non-technical version is that it is targeting two specific genes that controls the copying of DNA--and to be honest it's not genes specific to cancer cells though mutations involving this gene can be a cause of cancer in many different cells. (Usually, however, you can and do denote as much.) It may be that the things they tested are not merely specific inhibitors of the genes they discuss but also only get the version that would be causing cancer, but it doesn't mention that in the abstract. Several of these things are the sort of information that I would hope Nature have insisted get mentioned in the abstract, actually, since it's rather important...but they're a pay-to-read so I guess sticking important information behind the paywall matters.

If people are really interested, I can snag a copy via other means and do a summary.

Re:Universal anticancer

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's not clear that they're claiming they targeted cancer cells only. What's neat is the senescence, and the animal models don't need to survive generally. There are other means to target cancer cells, so a combination of techniques seems like further research.

Re:Universal anticancer

[rtb61]

That idea, the identification of cancer cells leads to the probable best way to treat them. Find exactly what is different in cancer cells and target that difference with a tag, the body will identity as foreign and then attack itself. So rather than attempting to destroy the cancer cells, let the existing immune system do that for you, all you need to do is tag that cell, so the immune system will now recognise and attack it.

Re:Universal anticancer

[Mal-2]

If by that you mean "find it on SciHub", yeah, that'd be kinda nice if you did.

Go read king of all maladies

[f00zbll]

If you read the book, you'll see that scientists have cured cancer in mice for more 2 decades, but it never works in humans. Anyone foolish enough to believe the hype isn't thinking clearly and has a sad understanding of science.

Re:Go read king of all maladies

[mentil]

That's it, I'm using CRISPR to turn myself into a mouse.

Re:Go read king of all maladies

[Cinnamon Beige]

It's not that it never works in humans, a rather significant number of drugs just never really make it to the market for various reasons--including things like not wanting to have to deal with lawsuits from idiots who didn't pay attention when told that this only sometimes worked/needed time to work/only worked on very specific cancers/any and all combinations thereof. It's expensive to do human testing, too, especially since having somebody drop dead while you're testing it may result in an auto-fail even if it's almost certainly not anything whatsoever to do with the drug.

Drug agencies tend to be rather paranoid about letting drugs onto the market...and pretty laid back once it has been, never mind that (especially in diverse countries) there are some side effects you just cannot expect to routinely and reliably catch in testing.

Re:The same tactic....

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Was exactly my first thought. Now just fire phasers at the disabled cells!

jargon deficit disorder

[epine]

The lead managed not to name the researchers, the cancer drugs, or the cancer targets.

blah blah VAGUE blah blah VAGUE blah blah VAGUE

News for Nerds with jargon deficit disorder.

Re: Don't tell me about the pain, researchers

[alvinrod]

I would gladly accept a pill I need to take for the rest of my life that works every time over the current form of treatment that may or may not cure me, but will leave me feeling as though I might just be half dead.

But even if that comes to pass and these researchers become filthy rich from charging ridiculous prices, that only creates a massive incentive for someone else to find a cheaper solution. Even if no one does, eventually we get generics after the patents expire and there will be plenty of countries that make their own versions of the drug for cheap as they could not care less about the profits of some foreign drug company or keeping the Western governments behind them happy.

Re:Permanently, or until the money runs out?

[muecksteiner]

Seriously, I've heard from multiple chemists in such companies, that basically, they try varying modifications, until one turns out to have an interesting effect. ... They honestly can't tell in advance ... I'm OK with that. I'm just not OK with acting like it is oh-so scientific and skilled.

Because being able to isolate the active ingredient(s) in some natural remedy, manipulating its chemical structure in a controlled fashion, and conducting meaningful and repeatable experiments on whether the modified compound is any better than the original is of course not science by any standard, right?

Just because the question of which modifications actually increase or decrease the viability of a given compound is not easily answered up front, this does not automatically mean that the entire process is bogus. Or, for that matter, particularly cheap for the entity which conducts the research (and which, predictably, wants to see some return on investment later). In turn, this of course means that if there was some way to conduct pharma research in a more focused manner, the profit seekers would be all over it. Trouble is, computational chemistry (especially in organics) has been a long way in coming, so there is no real alternative to tinkering. Yet.

Another cancer breakthrough we'll never see again

[Applehu Akbar]

The cancer drug I will take when the time comes will be the new one announced by China that US and European pharma will angrily call a theft of its own IP. That's how I will know it's not just another bullshit folk remedy.

For those who can't be bothered to read...

[LetterRip]

It works by targeting mutations of the KAT6A and KAT6B - which are common in a variety of cancers.

When the cells are functioning normally they can be inhibited to put a cell into senescene (sleep) after specific functions are completed, but the mutations result in the these genes being permanently on and never going back to sleep.

Here is a good summary from the end of the nature article,

n summary, using high-throughput screening followed by medicinal chemistry optimization, in-cell assays, biochemical assessment of target engagement and tumour models in mice and fish, we have developed a novel class of inhibitors for a hitherto unexplored category of epigenetic regulators. These inhibitors engage the MYST family of lysine acetyltransferases in primary cells, specifically induce cell cycle exit and senescence, and are effective in preventing the progression of lymphoma in mice.

They didn't note (and don't seem to know) why it doesn't impact health cells but it apparently doesn't based on current testing.

Re:For an effective and lasting cure,

[micahraleigh]

Was disturbed to see on that Immortals Netflix documentary how Cambridge students voted against extending lifespans.

Education is the process invoked to turn young humans into Josef Stalins.

The other scandalous thing, if you watch Ken Burn's documentary on cancer, is that immunotherapy research could have started back in the 70's with the war on cancer ... but it didn't because ... the academic elite didn't think it had academic significance.

Makes it hard for me to not question the significance of academics and centrally managed research (or central anything).