There may be a way to use higher doses of chemotherapy and radiation without killing healthy cells.
Side effects such as heart damage, nausea, and hair loss occur when cancer therapy kills healthy cells along with the malignant cells that are being targeted. It is a medical form of collateral damage.
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Alexey Ryazanov, a professor of pharmacology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, says if healthy cells were protected, then doses of chemo and radiation could actually be increased, “killing all the cancer cells and the patient would be cured. We also could start treating cancers that now can’t be cured because the most effective doses are too toxic to normal tissues.”
The key to Ryazanov’s vision of cancer treatment is addition by subtraction—specifically elimination of eEF2K—an enzyme that influences the rates at which proteins are created in the human body. Ryazanov first identified eEF2K more than a quarter century ago, and since then, bit by bit, he and other scientists have uncovered many complicated processes for which that enzyme is responsible.
Remove the enzyme
Ryazanov’s latest findings, published in the journal Developmental Cell, demonstrate that the presence of eEF2K weakens healthy cells. His evidence is the enzyme’s involvement in a process where defective cells involved in reproduction are degraded—and ultimately destroyed—as a way to preserve genetic quality from one generation to the next.
There is eEF2K in every cell in the body, and Ryazanov says the enzyme’s presence tends to leave cells less robust than they otherwise would be. According to Ryazanov, it is that added weakness that leaves healthy cells vulnerable to being poisoned by chemo and radiation.
Ryazanov says removing the enzyme would make those healthy cells stronger, to the point where they would survive cancer therapy. That, in turn, would eliminate the side effects.
How would healthy cells survive cancer treatment while malignant cells would not?
Ryazanov explains that tumors grow and cancer spreads when malignant cells divide and duplicate. Chemo and radiation are specifically designed to block cell division, and Ryazanov says removing the enzyme eEF2K actually makes the cancer cells more vulnerable to the treatment.
By contrast, as long as healthy cells are strong enough to resist being poisoned, the cancer therapies won’t hurt them.
Source: Rutgers
