Aussie boffins make cancer breakthrough
Australian scientists have come with a new therapy to combat cancer using the good old 'Trojan Horse' technique.
They've developed a bacterially-derived nano cell to penetrate and disarm the cancer cell before a second nano cell kills it with chemotherapy drugs.
The trojan horse therapy has the potential to directly target cancer cells with chemotherapy, rather than the current treatment that sees chemotherapy drugs injected into a cancer patient and attacking both cancer and healthy cells.
Sydney scientists Dr Jennifer MacDiarmid and Dr Himanshu Brahmbhatt say they have achieved an impressive 100 per cent survival in mice with human cancer cells by using the technique in the past two years.
The scientists plan to start human clinical trials in the coming months.
The therapy sees mini-cells called EDVs (EnGenelC Delivery Vehicle) attach and enter the cancer cell.
The first wave of mini-cells switch off the production of proteins that make the cancer cell resistant to chemotherapy.
A second wave is then accepted by the cancer cell and releases chemotherapy drugs, killing the cancer cell stone dead.
"The beauty is that our EDVs operate like 'Trojan Horses' They arrive at the gates of the affected cells and are always allowed in," said MacDiarmid.
"We are playing the rogue cells at their own game. They switch-on the gene to produce the protein to resist drugs, and we are switching-off the gene which, in turn, enables the drugs to enter."
It sounds like the duo are on the right track and, hopefully, this technique could be a major weapon in the war against cancer.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
