JOIN USBangalore scientists take a leap in cancer cure
Bangalore scientists have developed a potential new anti-cancer drug that can significantly improve the efficacy of radiotherapy and chemotherapy — two standard options for cancer treatment."
A team led by researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) designed, synthesised and tested a molecule known as SCR-7, which may also emerge as a new anti-cancer drug as it was found to halt the growth of cancerous tumours and prolonged the lifespan of mice in extensive laboratory experiments."
“The potential application in chemo and radiotherapy looks more promising because of the impact on existing patients. It potentiated their effects even on unresponsive tumours.
This could be a major step in the improvement of existing regimens for cancer treatment, and US pharmaceutical companies have expressed their interest to collaborate with us for clinical trials,” Sathees Raghavan, a professor of biochemistry at IISc who led the team, told Deccan Herald.
The success in laboratory, however, does not mean its immediate availability in clinics as completing clinical trials and obtaining regulatory approvals may take close to 8-10 years.
What the researchers from IISc — together with colleagues from the Bangalore-based KLE University and Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology as well as Advanced Centre for Treatment, Education and Research in Mumbai — did was to boost the process of cell death (known as apoptosis) in cancer cells.
Failure of apoptosis is one of the key contributing factors behind uncontrolled growth of tumours inside the body leading to cancer.
In the regular bodily process, a large number of cells die because of breaks in the double-stranded DNA. The body, however, has a repair mechanism inside the cell to stitch back the two DNA strands together, thereby preventing cell death. Since DNA breaks mean cell death, the body tries to do the damage control quickly.
SCR-7 blocks this precise repair mechanism encouraging cells to die, retarding the growth of cancerous tumours. “The results were encouraging in carcinoma (breast and prostate cancer) and sarcoma,” Sathees said. Both are extremely common forms of cancers.
“The use of DNA repair inhibitors along with existing chemo- and radiotherapeutics could improve efficacy of treatment,” the team reported in the December 21 issue of the journal Cell.
When the drug was administered to laboratory mice with various cancerous tumours, the size of tumour was reduced by half within 20 days.