Front in Oncol: Develop a new drug that effectively prevents cancer metastasis or is expected to be a new anti-cancer weapon!

6, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Frontiers in Oncology, scientists from the University of Salford and others made a major discovery that research could turn cancer into a treatable disease and effectively eliminate cancer fears.
Despite years of research and billions of pounds of investment by scientists in cancer research, there are still no MHRA/FDA-approved drugs for cancer prevention, so cancer metastasis remains a thorny issue for future scientists.
image Source: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain What is cancer metastasis? Cancer metastasis begins when cancer cells spread throughout the body, usually in organs such as the brain, bone tissue, lungs and liver, and once the cancer metasses, it turns it into a very difficult disease to treat, and there is no effective treatment for cancer metastasis.
After surgically removing the body's primary tumor, most cancer patients treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy can effectively remove the remaining cancer cells left in the body by incomplete surgical removal of the cancerous tissue, but unfortunately, many cancer patients will eventually experience tumor recurrence, which will eventually lead to the metastasis of the cancer cells at the far end.
As a result, more than 90 percent of patients treated end up dying of cancer metastasis as a result of failed treatments, so it's especially important to find inhibitors that effectively inhibit cancer metastasis because they can turn cancer into a chronic treatable disease.
To fill this gap in the study and meet clinical needs, researchers found that the Achilles heel of cancer metastasis may be ATP consumption, a process that can be achieved by simply removing cancer cells to create new energy.
researcher Michael Lisanti said: 'We designed and tested a new type of cancer metastase inhibitor based on the current FDA-approved antibiotic, dorcycline, which was approved for use in 1967; Chemical modification of dorcycline increases the potential of its targeted metastasis cancer cells by more than five times, and fortunately, chemical modification also prevents dorcycline from functioning like antibiotics, which effectively reduces the risk of antibiotic-resistant viruses and infections.
also noted that the drug, called Doxy-Myr, also reflects the addition of a fatty acid, which is also non-toxic in preclinical studies.
Finally, the researchers say that while the new drug family must now undergo clinical trials, the results of this paper directly demonstrate that specific drugs to prevent cancer metastasis can be successfully designed by targeting the energy production process of the acting cells, so cutting off the energy supply of cancer cells may be effective in preventing their metastasis, a breakthrough in the study that could help change current clinical practice, that is, by increasing the prevention of cancer metastasis, it may be available as a new and effective treatment to combat cancer progression.
() Original source: Béla szsvári, Luma G. Magalhães, Joe Latimer, et al. A Myristoyl Amide Derivative of Doxycycline Potently Targets Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) and Prevents Spontaneous Metastasis, Without Retaining Antibiotic Activity, Frontiers in Oncology (2020). DOI:10.3389/fonc.2020.01528.