"Hem" from cancer?
Biologists of the Russian Academy of Sciences found a "hidden weapon" in anti-cancer antibodies
Antibodies that help the immune system recognize cancer cells have another feature – they interfere with the work of some proteins inside the tumor and contribute to the accumulation of toxins inside it. This is written by Russian geneticists who published an article in the journal Bioessays (Dorokhov et al., Human Endogenous Formaldehyde as an Anticancer Metabolite: Its Oxidation Downregulation May Be a Means of Improving Therapy).
In recent years, molecular biologists and physicians have begun to pin special hopes on the so-called immunotherapy in the fight against cancer, allergies, diabetes and other incurable diseases. So, scientists are trying to "incite" human immunity to cancer cells using various antibodies and live microbes.
There are already several types of immunotherapy that have successfully passed clinical trials and are approved in the USA and a number of other countries. Most of them are synthetic antibodies that cling to cancer cells and make them "visible" to the immune system.
According to the press service of the Russian Science Foundation, Yuri Dorokhov from the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and his colleagues discovered a new interesting and useful property in these antibodies, the existence of which scientists had not previously suspected.
His team has been developing technologies for several years to grow such artificial antibodies in plant cells with modified DNA. Developing such molecules, scientists tested the effectiveness of their work by observing how they joined cancer cells and how their vital activity changed after that.
Experimenting with an antibody capable of recognizing several of the most common types of breast cancer, scientists noticed something unusual. The antibodies were not only attached to the shell of cancer cells, but also penetrated inside and combined with enzymes that decompose formaldehyde, a dangerous waste product.
Interestingly, the activity of these proteins was especially high in cancer cells, which led scientists to believe that such changes played a key role in their survival inside the body.
"We have recorded a relationship between the death of cancer cells and the level of accumulation of formaldehyde in them. After that, we suggested that by suppressing the activity of aldehyde dehydrogenases, we can stimulate the accumulation of this substance to a level that is toxic to the cell," the scientist continues.
Guided by this idea, scientists treated cancer cells with disulfiram and other substances that block the work of these enzymes. This technique dramatically lowered their resistance to the action of antibodies or chemotherapy and killed a significant portion of cancer cells even before scientists began to introduce other drugs into the nutrient mixture.
Accordingly, the use of such drugs in the future will help doctors improve the effectiveness of cancer treatment and reduce doses of more dangerous anti-cancer drugs, the authors conclude.
"Thanks to antibodies, we have discovered new approaches in cancer treatment based on the control of aldehyde dehydrogenase activity in patients. We suggest that suppressing the oxidation of formaldehyde may improve antitumor therapy," he concluded.
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