By SCIENCEDAILY STAFF - SCIENCEDAILY
Added: Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:42:55 UTC

Thanks to Crapsquire for the link

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have engineered a fundamentally new approach to killing cancer cells. The process -- developed by Niles Pierce, associate professor of applied and computational mathematics and bioengineering at Caltech, and his colleagues -- uses small RNA molecules that can be programmed to attack only specific cancer cells; then, by changing shape, those molecules cause the cancer cells to self-destruct.

In conventional chemotherapy treatments for cancer, patients are given drugs that target cell behaviors typical of -- but not exclusive to -- cancer cells. For example, cancer drugs commonly attack cells that divide rapidly, because such accelerated division is a hallmark of most cancer cells. Unfortunately, rapid cell division is a property of normal cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract, and hair follicles, and so these cells are also killed, leading to a host of debilitating side effects.

A better method, says Pierce, is to create drugs that can first distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells and then, once those cells have been spotted, mark them for destruction; in other words, to produce molecules that diagnose cancer cells before eradicating them. This type of therapy could do away with the side effects associated with conventional chemotherapy treatments. It also could be tailored on a molecular level to individual cancers, making it uniquely specific.

In a paper slated to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Pierce and his colleagues describe just such a process. It employs hairpin-shaped molecules known as small conditional RNAs, which are less than 30 base pairs in length. (An average gene is thousands of base pairs long.)
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TAGGED: GENETICS, MEDICINE