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

Side effects

[bobstreo]

can cause constipation, diarrhea, liver and kidney problems, can cause other cancers. Doh't take if you're allergic or have HEP C or a family history of thyroid cancer.

Price? $10000 a month, you'll have to take these drugs for the rest of your life.

XXXOOO, your pharmaceutical company. /s

If you had an MBA you would be.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is 600 current 20 year patents, plus the option of thousands more when they get closer to technical feasilbility. This is exactly the kind of thing intellectual property lawyers get hard over, and MBAs/beancounters drool over. The possibility of a 20 year lockdown on regular profits while being others over the barrel. It is even better when it's funded by the people so you didn't have to risk much if any of your wealth on it, and you can get exclusive licenses or patents to it yourselves.

The only people who lose are those who are sick with these cancers and too poor to afford the treatments when they are developed.

The main problem is ...

[fahrbot-bot]

... usually getting the drug delivered to the cancer w/o killing or severely injuring the patient. Many, many drugs work great in the lab, in a petri dish, etc.. but can't be delivered through the body to the target cancer/tumor cells w/o being broken down by the body or doing damage to the body, etc... It's usually a race between killing the cancer before killing the patient.

In addition, my understanding is that, radiation therapy works by damaging the DNA of cells as the reproduce -- the ones actually dividing *during* the radiation treatment -- so they will (eventually) no longer be able to reproduce. This is generally effective as cancer cells reproduce faster than regular cells, but regular cells get damaged too -- which is why there are treatment and lifetime limits on radiation therapy.

All of this is especially difficult with growing children as their cells tend to reproduce faster than in adults, so more damage is done during treatment -- or so I understand.

Remember Sue...