In an another breakthrough over cancer, scientists from Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) have revealed new findings that can help design new treatment methods for cancer.
Scientists have found that why a particular cancer drug is so effective at killing cells.
Professor Daniel Davis and his team used high quality video imaging to investigate why the drug rituximab is so effective at killing cancerous B cells.
The drug is commonly used in the treatment of B cell malignancies, such as lymphoma and leukaemia. Moreover, it is also quite effective in case of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.
Scientists used high-powered laser-based microscopes for the research and created videos of the process by which rituximab binds to a diseased cell and then allures white blood cells known as natural killer (NK) cells to attack.
They observed that drug rituximab has a tendency to attach to one side of the cancer cell, forming a cap and draws a number of proteins on that side. It effectively formed a front and back to the cell in which a cluster of protein molecules were massed on one side.
But the utter surprise for the scientists during the experiment was how this changed the effectiveness of natural killer cells in destroying these diseased cells. When the NK cells cinched onto the rituximab cap on the B cell, the success rate at killing the cell were found to be 80 percent. In contrary to that, when the B cell lacked this cluster of proteins on one side, it was killed only 40 percent of the time.
'These results were really unexpected. It was only possible for us to unravel the mystery of why this drug was so effective, through the use of video microscopy. By watching what happened within the cells we could clearly identify just why rituximab is such an effective drug - because it tended to reorganise the cancerous cell and make it especially prone to being killed,' Professor Davis said.
'What our findings demonstrate is that this ability to polarise a cell by moving proteins within it should be taken into consideration when new antibodies are being tested as potential treatments for cancer cells. It appears that they can be up to twice as effective if they bind to a cell and reorganise it,' he added.
The findings from this study have been published online on the website of the journal Blood.
-With inputs from ANI
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