PNAS: Uncovering the key role of CXCR4 subjects in cancer cells is expected to help develop individualized therapies for multiple cancers

February 3, 2021 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal PNAS, scientists from institutions such as the Max del Bruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Germany revealed the key role of CXCR4 subjects in cancer cells.
researcher Ali Isbilir says that when CXCR4 bines are present in large numbers on cancer cells, they ensure the migration of cancer cells, which can lay the groundwork for cancer metastasis, which is often difficult to treat and often causes secondary tumors in some patients with poor prognostication or death.
CXCR4 subjects are also involved in the occurrence of inflammation, in which the inflammatory center releases messenger substances from the coercion factor class, which in the lymph nodes ensures that immune cells form multiple CXCR4 subjects on their membranes, and with the help of these bodies, the immune cells can locate the inflammatory center and migrate there.
such a subject is an important target structure in pharmaceutical research, and nearly one-third of drugs are capable of targeting such subject molecules.
Photo Source: Paolo Annibale, Ali Isbilir, MDC So whether these subjects exist in pairs or single, not only at the heart of basic research, but also at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry, which researchers answer for the first time using new methods of optical microscopes; the
researchers found that this association depends primarily on the level of the CXCR4 subject located on the cell, and that if the cell surface is covered with CXCR4 molecules, it will form more pairs of subjects, which tend to appear alone if only a small number of subjects are present, while the researchers also found that specific drugs that can act as CXCR4 blockers may inhibit the formation of the pair.
the researchers speculated that CXCR4 pairs had an effect on the health of the body, so they used new microscopic methods to monitor whether this was really the case.
, the researchers combined two recently developed optical microscope methods to determine the association status of a single CXCR4 receptor on the surface of living cells with the help of a single molecule microscope, while the fluorescence rise and fall spectrum method Roscopy can also help determine this association in cells where a large number of subjects are present, and in order to do so, researchers must develop a method that effectively labels all the subjects, as well as a highly sensitive microscope technique to observe single molecules and the polymer reactions they occur.
researcher Annibale said: 'We are very excited that we can use these fluorescence methods to study living cancer cells, but also to clarify whether CXCR4 exists in pairs or alone.'
researchers can also apply CXCR4 blockers to a single or pair of CXCR4 subjects and detect whether they are effective against tumors, which could potentially help researchers develop new, highly effective cancer drugs with lower side effects.
Now, pathologists are analyzing in detail the properties of cancer patients' body cancer cells, which may allow cancer therapy to be designed in the most personalized and effective way possible; researchers hope it could also be used to screen different drugs that can affect the function of such a subject or similar, such as personalized new treatments for breast or lung cancer.
() original source: Ali Ibil?ir, Jan Möller, Marta Arimont, et al. Advanced fluorescence microscopy reveals disruption of dynamic CXCR4 dimerization by subpocket-specific inverse agonists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2013319117