2023-08-28 21:00:05
Cancer cells turning into cells capable of building muscle? That is what he claims to have achieved that the team of Christopher Vakocof the Laboratorio Cold Spring Harbor (USA), who has been trying to transform sarcoma cells into regularly functioning tissue cells for more than 6 years.
Sarcomas are cancers that form in connective tissues such as muscles. Treatment often combines chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, procedures that are especially aggressive for children. If doctors could transform cancer cells into healthy cells, it would offer patients a completely new treatment option, one that could spare them and their families a great deal of pain and suffering.
Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a devastating and aggressive type of pediatric cancer, resembles the muscle cells of children.
No one knew if this proposed treatment method, called differentiation therapy, could ever work in RMS. I could still be decades in the future. But now, thanks to Vackoc’s lab, it seems to be a real possibility.
To carry out their mission, Vakoc and his team created a new genetic detection technique. Using genome-editing technology, they searched for genes that, when disrupted, would force RMS cells to become muscle cells. It was then that a protein called NF-Y. With NF-Y altered, the scientists witnessed an amazing transformation.
“Cells literally become muscle,” says Vakoc. The tumor loses all its cancerous characteristics. They are going from a cell that just wants to multiply to cells dedicated to contraction. Because all of your energy and resources are now devoted to contraction, you can’t go back to this multiplying state.” That is, stop being cancerous.
The technology could be applicable to other types of cancer
This new relationship between NF-Y and RMS may trigger the chain reaction needed to bring differentiation therapy to patients.
And the mission doesn’t stop at the RMS. The technology could be applicable to other types of cancer. If so, scientists might one day figure out how to turn other tumors into healthy cells.
“This technology allows you to take any cancer and figure out how to make it differentiate,” explains Vakoc. This could be a key step in making differentiation therapy more accessible.”
Previously, the team transformed Ewing sarcoma cells into healthy tissue cells.
The discoveries about Ewing’s sarcoma and RMS were supported by local families who had lost loved ones to these cancers.
Those families and Vakoc’s lab could now be the heroes of a new origin story: a scientific breakthrough that could one day help save children’s lives and revolutionize cancer treatment as we know it.
“Every successful drug has its origin story. And research like this is the soil from which new medicines are born.”says Vakoc whose study is published in the journal «PNAS».
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