Cancer Cure Comes Closer

Published on Thursday, 08 September 2011 13:29

	By David Holman Follow @_AsktheExperts_

“Cure for cancer” has become synonymous with the ultimate in medical breakthrough. It’s one of the very few things which, throughout history, has continued to stump our best medical minds.

However, recently, progress seems to be surging ahead in this field. Tests are being developed for creating drugs which will target cancerous cells specifically, thereby slowing down their development, and hopefully curing them.

There have been several recent tacks taken to surmount this problem. One was to starve the cancers by restricting their diet. Cancerous cells absorb much more glucose than normal cells, using that energy to fuel their rapid replication and spread throughout the body.

Drugs have been developed which seem to inhibit the cells’ ability to intake sugar, thereby effectively slowing their growth. The drug STF-31, as outlined in Science Translational Medicine, seems to have no real side-effects (when tested in mice, at any rate), and has moved forward to pre-clinical testing.

After slowing the growth rate of these greedy cells, the next thing to do is to try and kill them off altogether. And that is where the new JX-594 drug comes into play. This drug from Jennerex is basically a virus designed specifically to target cancer cells, and acts in three ways.

First, it attacks cancerous cells and breaks them down by replicating itself within them. Also, it destroys the veins providing blood to the tumor, therefore starving it. Thirdly, as a virus it kicks the body’s own immune defence into action, making the body target its own defences on the cancerous area.

On top of all this, the virus is injected intravenously, meaning it can cruise around the body, and hopefully play a big part in preventing tumors spreading from one body part to another. And as a cherry on top, the virus seems very focused, causing damage to the cancerous cells while leaving normal tissue alone.

Seven out of 8 people given high doses found it replicating in the cancer, but not in normal tissue, and six of them saw the growth of their tumor halt or reverse. As opposed to blanket chemotherapy, the only side-effects seemed to be those similar to flu symptoms, which generally resolved themselves within 24 hours.

While this is not yet the “cure for cancer” we have been aiming for all this time, it certainly seems like a big step in the right direction. Clinical tests are ongoing, but with luck, that cure might not be too far away after all.