Medicine Marches On... New Cure for Cancer?

Yet another chemotherapy that hopes to kill the cancer cells before the non-cancer cells. But then, Laetrille uses a completely different mechanism as this new drug to achieve basically the same effect.

28 Aug, (foodconsumer.org) - A synthetic molecule that triggers cancer cells to commit suicide was effective in mouse cancer models, scientists said. They hope the finding will herald in new drugs that can activate this mechanism that causes cancer cells to hasten their own death.

The molecule killed human lung cancer cells and kidney cancer cells in mouse models and may give rise to drugs that can potentially activate the "executioner" mechanism in human cancer cells, the researchers said. The compound called procaspase activating compound, or PAC-1, transforms into caspase-3, which is a terminator enzyme that kills the cancer cells.

Normally the vast numbers of cells in the human body are active for a fixed number of days. When their activity nears its end internal mechanisms activate enzymes that destroy the cells. This physiological process is called apoptosis. However in cancer cells, this mechanism is shut off allowing the cancer to grow unhindered.

Chemically procaspase-3 is activated when normal cell death is imminent. In cancer although procaspase-3 levels are high, there is no activation mechanism and hence apoptosis cannot take place.

Chemist Paul Hergenrother of the University of Illinois and an international team of colleagues theorized that a compound that could activate procaspase-3 may induce cancer cells to kill themselves. The researchers screened 20,500 related molecules for this activation ability, but were able to find five molecules that could induce the process of programmed cell death in cancer.

Among these five compounds, they found that only one showed an increasingly strong effect with increased doses and that compound was named procaspase activating compound, or PAC-1.

"We have identified a small, synthetic compound that directly activates procaspase-3 and induces apoptosis," Hergenrother said. "By bypassing the broken pathway, we can use the cells' own machinery to destroy them." In order to test the efficacy of this compound, researchers induced human cancers in mouse models.

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