Will macroketone stop metastases?
A molecule that prevents the formation of cancer metastases has been created by scientists in the USA
VSESMI.RU based on ITAR-TASS materials
Scientists in the United States have synthesized a molecule called macroketone, capable of stopping the spread of tumor cells and the formation of metastases. According to them, this opens up a new, rather promising direction in the fight against cancer.
The research was conducted by a group of experts led by Dr. Huang Xinyun at the Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York and the Brookhaven National Nuclear Laboratory of the USA. The initial material for them was the so-called migrastatin, secreted by actinomycete bacteria and having a weakly expressed ability to prevent the migration of tumor cells.
As a result of many years of experiments, scientists have synthesized artificial analogues of migrastatin, which, according to Juan, are "a thousandfold" superior to the original in their effectiveness. Back in 2005, they published a paper showing that macroketone and its analogues stop metastasis. (Dandan Shan et al., Synthetic analogues of migrastatin that inhibit mammary tumor metastasis in mice – VM.) But then they did not understand why this was happening, and now they have found out and described the biological mechanism.
According to them, macroketone neutralizes the action of fascin, a protein involved in the stabilization of actin bundles in certain cellular processes. And without the formation of such bundles, cells cannot move, since individual actin fibers are too weak for this.
Consequently, the new molecule does not prevent the appearance of the original tumor, but does not allow the disease to spread. Experiments on mice showed that the effectiveness of macroketone in preventing the formation of metastases exceeded 80%. Even when it was injected into animals after the formation of a cancerous tumor, metastasis stopped. Mice lived a full life, whereas in control experiments their relatives who did not receive macroketone died from new foci of the disease.
An important additional advantage of his brainchild, Dr. Huang believes that there are no side effects. According to him, it is explained by the fact that fascinus is present in excess in metastatic tumor cells, but there is very little of it in simple epithelial cells. Accordingly, its neutralization has almost no effect on healthy cells.
The report on the study was published in the online edition of the journal "Nature", the press release was distributed by the press service of the Brookhaven Laboratory. (See Anti-cancer Agent Stops Metastasis in its Tracks - VM.)
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19.04.2010