US scientists develop cancer pill that kills solid tumors through targeted chemotherapy

In what can truly be termed as a great piece of news in a long time for the entire human kind, scientists at a leading US hospital have developed, "a cancer-killing pill." The pill has the potential to kill solid tumors through "targeted chemotherapy."

The research team while talking about the development and explaining the pill, likened it to a, "snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells." The protein, developed by a team at the cancer research and treatment organization City of Hope in the US, has been developed over the last two decades.

The pill, has reportedly been shown to be effective in preclinical research treating a host of cancers like breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin and lung cancers.

Technically, the molecule AOH1996 works by targeting a cancerous variant of PCNA, a protein critical to DNA replication and repair of enlarging tumors. Explaining further, Linda Malkas, Ph.D, professor in City of Hope's Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics, says, "PCNA is like a major airline terminal hub containing multiple plane gates.

Data suggests PCNA is uniquely altered in cancer cells, and this fact allowed us to design a drug that targeted only the form of PCNA in cancer cells." She adds, "Our cancer-killing pill is like a snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells."

Confident of the discovery being a significant breakthrough in the field, the team says, "Results have been promising. AOH1996 can suppress tumor growth as a monotherapy or combination treatment in cell and snimal models without resulting in toxicity. The investigational chemotherapeutic is currently in a Phase 1 clinical trial in humans at City of Hope."

Professor Long Gu, PhD and lead author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics, at Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope, said, "No one has ever targeted PCNA as a therapeutic because it was viewed as undruggable but clearly City of Hope was able to develop an investigational medicine for a challenging protein target."

He further adds, "We discovered that PCNA is one of potential causes of increased nucleic acid replication errors in cancer cells.Now that we know the problem area and can inhibit it, we will dig deeper to understand the process to develop more personalized, targeted cancer medicines."

Published in the journal Cell Chemical Biology, the study tested the protein across 70 cancer cell lines. The results showed that AOH1996 selectively kills cancer cells by, "disrupting the normal cell reproductive cycle." The team hopes to successfully conduct clinical trials in humans in the next stage.

A generic term for a large group of diseases affecting different parts of the body, many cancers can be cured if detected early. According to the data by World Health Organisation, cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths."

What's targeted therapy?

A type of cancer treatment that targets proteins that control how cancer cells grow, divide, and spread, targeted therapy involves researchers learn more about the DNA changes and proteins that drive cancer, and design treatments that target these proteins. It could be either small-molecule drugs or monoclonal antibodies.

However, targeted therapy does have some drawbacks. Cancer cells can become resistant to targeted therapy or drugs for some targets are hard to develop, depending on the target cell's structure, its function in the cell, or both.