Could tailored therapies target cancers with a recycling problem?
Cancer types:
General cancer research
Project period:
–
Award amount:
£210,627
Location:
Netherlands
Dr Kasper Rouschop and his team are investigating cancers that lack the ability to recycle old cells, which could make them more vulnerable to treatments. They hope this will allow the creation of tailored cancer therapies with fewer side effects.
Why is this research needed?
Cancer is a genetic disease – it happens when the genes in our body malfunction. Because all of us have different genes, cancer can appear differently in each individual patient. There is rarely a “one size fits all” treatment, and although chemotherapy and radiotherapy work for a lot of different cancer types, they have challenging side effects.
There is an urgent need for gentler, targeted treatments so that doctors can treat patients with the therapy that works best for their cancer.
Dr Rouschop and his team are looking into how a subset of some types of cancers grow, and whether there are ways to intervene and kill off cancer cells. These cancers lack the genes that give them the ability to recycle old cells. Identifying new treatments for these cancers could lead to kinder therapies for thousands of patients.
Cancer research doesn’t stop at borders. Only combined efforts and learning from peers locally, nationally and internationally will lead to advancements in our understandings of cancer.
What is the science behind this project?
Our bodies have a built-in cell recycling system. Even healthy cells have a limited lifespan, and when they start to malfunction a process called autophagy starts.
Like taking your broken down car to the scrap yard, the salvageable pieces are picked out from the junk and recycled to make new, healthy cells. This recycling is also a crucial tool for cancer cells – without it, they would struggle to grow.
However, this team of researchers in the Netherlands have discovered a subset of cancers that don’t have this ability to recycle. By looking at the genes associated with autophagy in cancers, they found that anywhere between 8 and 40% of a range of different cancer types could be autophagy-deficient, including prostate, ovarian, kidney, lung and head and neck cancers.
How autophagy-deficient cancers survive is a bit of a mystery to researchers – these cancers must develop unique coping mechanisms. But this could make them more vulnerable than normal cells if these mechanisms fail, and Dr Rouschop hoped to target this vulnerability.
He will identify the survival mechanisms of autophagy-deficient cancers, and block these using existing anti-cancer drugs – causing the cancer cells to rapidly die off.
What difference could this project make to patients in the future?
This targeted treatment could be more efficient, and less harmful to healthy cells, than standard cancer therapies. The team are particularly interested in head and neck cancers, as up to 4 in 10 cases are autophagy-deficient, and the side effects of existing treatments can have a significant long term impact on patients’ quality of life.
Gentler, more effective treatments could not only prevent lives from being cut short, but also lead to those lives being happier and healthier.
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