Researchers have struggled to find a cure for cancer for a long time. Healing is so the main goal, but the majority of medical professionals and patients will be excited to hear new discoveries about this treatment.
Cancer treatment is now often full of severe side effects make patients give up. Imagine, when a blood cancer or leukemia patients wanted to stop the dangerous growth of cancer cells, healthy cells almost always damaged.
Thanks to the breakthrough scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), they found that cancer treatment terbru. Laboratory team found thanks to inadvertence.
Laboratory teams are working on several therapies for people who lack of white blood cells or have abnormalities in the immune system, when they saw some unusual effects of the antibody on bone marrow cells.
They have been looking for antibodies that are activating receptor on the growth of immature bone marrow. That is, the antibody will be able to induce these cells to mature into specific blood cell types.
In a new study, Richard A. Lerner, professor of the Institute, Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry at the TSRI, as well as their counterparts fellow researchers decided to test 20 receptor-activating antibodies were recently found on myeloid leukemia cells Acute taken from human patients.
One of the antibodies ultimately have a tremendous impact on leukemia cells. "Antibodies that can alter cells of acute myeloid leukemia into many other cell types. But somehow we were lucky enough to obtain NK cells," Lerner said in a press release, quoted medicaldaily.com, Monday (10/26/2015) pm ,
NK has unique characteristics as observed by electron microscopy. In laboratory tests, NK cells 'betray' their former brothers with impressive speed. NK cells by simply taking about 15 percent of a population of leukemia cells within 24 hours.
They attacked only leukemic cells are related, while the cells were not affected by breast cancer, for example, did not die in large numbers when put in contact with NK cells.
This team still do not understand exactly why NK cells to behave like this, but hypothesize that other antibodies are found that could be the key to change other types of cancer cells to NK cells.
"This is a completely new approach to cancer, and we are working to test on human patients as soon as possible. We are in discussions with pharmaceutical companies to test this directly to humans after appropriate preclinical toxicity studies," said Lerner.
Source: Yea K, Zhang H, Lerner R, et al. Human antibody agonist that induces malignant cells to kill one another. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015.