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Researchers Engineer A Way To Make Leukemic Cells To Kill Each Other

Researchers are battling to find the cure of cancer with minimum side effects, since they understood what cancer really was. Current cancer treatment often come with so severe side effects that the patient chose to forgo them alltogether, as the current treatment always causes damage to surrounding healthy cells.

A treatment that changes cancerous cells into healthy cell or transforming them into antibodies that would attack the remaining cancer cells, sounds ideal. Say thanks to the scientists of the ‘’ The Scripps Research Institute’’ (TSRI), this powerfull cancer therapy could really be on the horizon.

While working on therapies for certain immune cells and blood factor deficencies, they accidently noticed some unusaul effects of antibodies on marrow cells . They had been searching for antibodies that activate Growth Factor Receptor (GFR) on bone marrow(BM) cells, inducing them to mature into specific blood cell type. During this succesful job done, the team noticed that some of antibodies had unexpected effects on cells they expected. This got the team to think, can they convert cancerous marrow cells(Leukemic Cells) into non-cancerous cells?

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In the new study, the scientists(From UK, China, Germania, France , Poland ) along with Dr. Lerner R, and Dr.kyungmoo Yea at TSRI , decided to test 20 of the recently discovered recepter-activating  antibodies on acute myloid leukemia(AML) taken from human patients. One of the antibody ended up having an incred- ible impact on the leukemic cells. Most AML Cells have Thrombopoitin Recepter, a recepter the wining an- tibody selectively and potentially activated in marrow cells. When the antibodies applied to healthy marrow cells, cells matured to megakaryocytes. 

When applied to AML Cells, though the antibodies cause them to be mature dendritic cells, key support in immune army system. The success , the researchers had effectivly transformed cancerous cells into non-cancerous cells, the dendritic(NK) Cells, helpful immune system cells, that even longer exposure to antibodies , become capable to attack on pathogens and tumour(even if they don’t contain biomarker).

On Electron Microscopy , the induced NK Cells, possed unique characteristics i.e extending dendrites, that made their way through the outer membrane to closeby leukemic cells.

It was more interesting to note the fratricidal nature of NK Cells , that they attacked on AML Cells, while unreacted to Breast cancer cells; the team is still unclear why NK cells behave so. 

The researchers name this type of therapy ‘’Fratricidins’’ , one of its several advantage is the high specificity of NK cells to tumor (AML Cells) only, and least to damage the normal body tissue cells, making Fratrici- dins much more tolerable than Radio/Chemotherapy. ‘’ Its a totally new approach to cancer , and we are working to test it in human patients as soon as possible. we are in discussion with pharmaceutical companies to take this straight into humans, after appropriate preclinical toxicity studies’’. Said by Lerner R and Yea k.