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Israeli cancer research scientists make breakthrough in finding safer alternative to chemotherapy

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – In a groundbreaking study that may offer cancer patients a much safer alternative to chemotherapy, scientists at Israel’s Tel Aviv University were able to permanently eliminate 44% to 60% of melanoma cancer cells in mice by encoding a toxin produced by bacteria into mRNA molecules and injecting it directly into the animals’ tumor bed, the Jerusalem Post reports.

Led by doctoral student Yasmin Granot-Matok and Prof. Dan Peer, head of the Nanomedicine Laboratory at TAU’s Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, the study was published in Theranostics under the title “Lipid nanoparticles-loaded with toxin mRNA represents a new strategy for the treatment of solid tumors,” JPost said.

Notably, unlike chemotherapy where molecules of toxins kill both cancerous and healthy cells, the technique adopted in the TAU study kills only the malignant cells, JPost reports. Moreover, the TAU researchers induced the cancer cells to themselves produce the toxic protein that ultimately killed them.

“In our study, the cancer cell produced the toxic protein that eventually killed it,” Peer said in a statement. “We used pseudomonas bacteria and the melanoma cancer, but this was only a matter of convenience. Many anaerobic bacteria (that exist without free oxygen) – especially those that live in the ground – secrete toxins, and most of these can probably be used with our method.”

“This is our ‘recipe,’ and we know how to deliver it directly to the target cells with our nanoparticles,” Peers said. “When the cancer cell reads the ‘recipe’ at the other end, it starts to produce the toxin as if it were the bacteria itself – and this self-produced toxin eventually kills it. So, with a simple injection to the tumor bed, we can cause cancer cells to ‘commit suicide’ without damaging healthy cells. In addition, cancer cells can’t develop resistance to our technology, as often happens with chemotherapy, because we can always use a different natural toxin.”