A New Weapon Against Tumor Cells

A new drug could prove to be more effective in cancer treatment as tests show that it is about 200 times more active in killing tumor cells. The active agent comes from a class of drugs called bisphosphonates and it was developed by a team of 24 researches from four countries.

Although they were primarily conceived as a treatment for osteoporosis and other bone diseases, recent discoveries show that bisphosphonates also have inhibitory effects on enzymes such as FPPS and GGPPS, which leads to killing cancer cells with more efficiency that the drugs aimed at the protein Ras (which presents mutations in a third of human cancer cells and represented a less successful target for drug developers).

Derived from bisphosphonates (and used alongside hormonal treatment) the drug zoledronate proved effective in reducing the recurrence of breast cancer in premenopausal women with estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer and hormone-refractory prostate cancer in men but its efficiency proved diminished by the fact that it binds faster to the bone rather than getting to the tissues where it was needed.

In trying to find a new drug that wouldn’t have this side effect and which would also inhibit more than just one enzyme in the cancer cell’s survival pathway, a new study was carried, led by Professor Eric Oldfield of the University of Illinois. The research team managed to produce drugs that bonded to multiple enzyme targets but not to bone, of which BPH-715 effectively inhibited tumor cell growth and invasiveness and killed tumor cells in mice. BPH-715, as well as zoledronate, also has the effect of increasing the production of gamma delta T-cells, immune system cells that also kill tumor cells.