New Line of Attack in Fight Against Cancer
7 July 2011 - Scientists have uncovered a new way of killing cancer cells, opening up a potentially highly effective avenue of attack against all forms of the disease.
The findings from the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research, led by Professor Pascal Meier, shed light on why cancer patients can fail to respond to some chemotherapy drugs and reveal a new way of targeting resistant tumours.
Until recently, it was thought cells could only die through a process called apoptosis. Because apoptosis is often blocked in cancer cells, drugs frequently do not work, allowing tumour cells to grow and spread.
In work published in the Molecular Cell journal, the team found some chemotherapeutics – topoisomerase inhibitors – actually worked through a newly-discovered form of cell death, known as necroptosis. They identified for the first time how a number of key proteins work together to kill cancer cells through necroptosis.
Importantly, they found in the laboratory it was possible to activate the set of proteins and push cancer cells into this form of cell death, raising hope of new targeted treatments that could also kill apoptosis-resistant tumour cells.
