Scientists Have Found 600 New Cancer Vulnerabilities, Each Could Be the Target of a Drug (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists have taken cancer apart piece-by-piece to reveal its weaknesses, and come up with new ideas for treatment. A team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute disabled every genetic instruction, one at a time, inside 30 types of cancer. It has thrown up 600 new cancer vulnerabilities and each could be the target of a drug. Cancer Research UK praised the sheer scale of the study.

The researchers disrupted nearly 20,000 genes in more than 300 lab-grown tumors made from 30 different types of cancer. The results, published in the journal Nature, revealed 6,000 crucial genes which at least one type of cancer needs to survive. Some were unsuitable for developing cancer drugs, as they are also essential in healthy cells. Others are already the target of precision drugs like Herceptin in breast cancer -- the team called this a "sanity check" that proves their method works. And yet more are beyond current science to develop suitable drugs, so the researchers narrowed down a shortlist of 600 potential new targets for drugs to attack.

Comments

Re:Side effects

[fahrbot-bot]

can cause constipation, diarrhea, liver and kidney problems, can cause other cancers. ...
Price? $10000 a month, ...

You jest, but... my wife died of a brain tumor (GBM) in 2006, just seven weeks after diagnosis. Her chemotherapy medicine was Temodar and the list price was $11,000 for a one-month supply of pills (several months would normally be needed). She had both my BC/BS and her Optima insurance -- on BC/BS the co-pay was 10% ($1,100) on her Optima it was $40 (yes, forty).

The instructions cautioned against prolonged handling of the pills and breathing dust from them as that could cause -- wait for it -- cancer.

Attack the vulnerabilities with DNA nanobots

[steveha]

A couple of years ago I read about an exciting new approach to treating cancer: DNA nanobots. These are very simple machines made from DNA.

How simple are they? They are hollow capsules with a hinge and a latch. The one function of the nanobot is to pop the latch open under the correct circumstances.

(Note: I'm a software developer, not any kind of doctor or scientist, and I'm describing this in my own words based on my own understanding. Apologies if I get anything wrong. Links at the end so you can go to better sources.)

The latch can be configured to open only when it bumps into a specific protein. For example, a protein only found on the cancer to be treated.

The idea is that a nano-dose of strong medicine is inserted into the "nanobot" capsules. Each does of medicine is tiny but there are literally trillions of capsules. (That's why they are made out of DNA... no person and no machine can make these, they are self-assembling.) Then the capsules are introduced into the body of the patient. They travel along through the body, bumping into things, and the medicine doesn't do anything because it's contained inside the capsule. Then, when the capsule happens to bump into a cancer cell, the latch opens, the medicine is released, and a nanodose of the medicine is administered directly to the cancer cell.

What I found exciting about this is that it decouples the problems of being both safe and effective. We have plenty of effective anti-cancer drugs, but many of them are useless because they aren't safe. They aren't selective enough; they will kill healthy tissue as much as they kill cancer cells. But if we can program the latch to open only when near the cancer cells, potentially these same drugs would now become safe to use. The nanobot makes the effective drugs safe.

The research from the news story identifies many targets. If the latch can be programmed using this new data, potentially the nanobots can be tailored to attack any kind of cancer and not hurt any healthy tissue.

From time to time I check the news to see if there is anything new about DNA nanobots. The original research I read about has gone silent... I read somewhere that a major drug company had bought the research so maybe it's quietly being developed (and the staggering piles of paperwork quietly started at the FDA).

Here is the research I originally read about:

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/12/ido-bachelet-announces-2015-human-trial.html

I didn't find any follow-up about the human trial. I'm wondering whether the treatment worked and the patient was saved.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5nck89/what_happened_ido_bachelet_and_leukemia_nanobot/

Here's what appears to be another research team pursuing the same idea.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212112000.htm

Re:Attack the vulnerabilities with DNA nanobots

[at0mjack]

Can we cut the stupid conspiracy theories, please?

Gilead released Sovaldi and Harvoni few years ago - new drugs, based on new drug targets, which cure hepatitis C. Cure, not treat. Gilead has to date made more than $20 billion from these drugs, and is currently disappointing analysts by forecasting that annual revenues will drop to only $3-4 billion a year over the next few years. In the meantime, competitor companies that made less-effective antiviral treatments that used to be the standard of care for Hep C have seen their sales fall to zero.

There isn't a megalithic "Pharma industry" - there's a whole big bunch of companies, all desperately in competition with each other. If one of them came up with a decent cure for a common type of cancer, they would easily be raking in tens of billions of dollars of profit from it, and their competitors' less-effective treatments would see their sales fall off a cliff. The idea that a company would forego massive revenues in order to protect their competitor's profits is just laughable.

There's a lot wrong with the pharma industry, their pricing models, the way that competition works, and so on, so I'm far from being an apologist for them. However, the idea that there's an easy cancer cure out there and that it's being buried to protect profits is just dumb. The reason there's no cancer cure is that it's not one disease, it's hundreds of different diseases, finding something that will work is just plain hard, and when we do find something that works it usually works less well than was hoped.

One final rebuttal to the conspiracy theory nonsense: the world's largest independent charitable research institute is the Institute for Cancer Research, in the UK. It's spent a hundred million dollars per year every year over the last few decades on cancer research. They have produced a few promising-looking treatments for a few specific types of cancer (eg Abiraterone gives advanced prostate cancer patients a few months more life on average), but haven't really done any better than any of the large pharmas in terms of producing effective treatments. Why not? Because it's hard, not because they are Illuminati on the payroll of Big Pharma.