SCI trans Med: antiviral therapy helps to develop anticancer drugs

January 24, 2020 / Biovalley / for many years, Jeffrey Glenn, a virologist at Stanford University, has been trying to develop new ways to fight viruses that cause hepatitis and the common cold; but the lessons they have learned from antiviral therapy may help treat cancer Glenn said the basic idea of the new approach is to disrupt the normal cellular processes that viruses and certain cancer cells rely on to grow and spread Now, tests on mice have shown that this type of drug can shrink tumors and prevent their spread The results were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine Initially, when they were looking for new ways to stop the hepatitis virus, Glenn and his colleagues thought that they could try to bypass the virus itself and instead target the function of target cells hijacked by the virus for replication and transmission In 2015, Jeffrey Glenn Ph.D and colleagues at the National Institutes of health showed that this new method can prevent hepatitis C virus from replicating and releasing new virus genes in patients Later, they optimized their strategy to kill enteroviruses Glenn and his lab continued to develop antiviral drugs, and their work attracted the attention of Jonathan kurie, a professor at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas Kurie wrote to Glenn after reading a paper on the first compounds developed by Glenn and his colleagues, asking for some drugs "I told him that we have better molecules now, and we've known for a long time that they can also play a role in cancer," Glenn said In the new paper, the team showed that their hunch was right - Glenn, the same drug Smith and colleagues developed to treat enteroviruses can also treat certain types of cancer, at least in mice and human cancer cells in laboratory experiments In the mouse study, the team tested a drug that reduced the chance of cancer cells spreading from one side of the lung to the other In combination with another compound, the rate of cancer cell metastasis decreased below the observed level, and both drugs reduced the tumor size at the primary site After just a week of treatment, the amount of human breast cancer that grows in mice also shrinks by half The team also began to consider ways to use new drugs, such as in combination with existing therapies, to make them more resistant to drug-resistant tumors "Our findings suggest that this approach may be useful in many cancers." Sources of information: antiviral treatments inspire researchers to develop a new kind of cancer drug: X Tan El Al., "pi4kiii β is a thermal target in chrome 1q – amplified lung adenocarcinoma," Science Translational Medicine (2020) STM Sciencemag.org/lookup/doi / scitranslmed.aax3772