Are scientists able to take immortality from cancer cells?
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Scientists from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) have discovered a new strategy to fight cancer, which is very different from those described to date. Their work shows for the first time that telomeres—the structures protecting the ends of the chromosomes—may represent an effective anti-cancer target: by blocking the TRF1 gene, which is essential for the telomeres, they have shown dramatic improvements in mice with lung cancer.
Hello Arash,
Yes, that is possible to an extent. But in that case CSCs may survive which are not really proliferating. Second, the side effects on normal cells can be fatal. Nothing can be clear without a proper clinical trial. Lets hope for the best..
Attempts to render cancer cells mortal have more-often focused on drugging telomerase, though there are reasons to think that interfering with the shelterin complex might work -- though it seems risky.
There are a few attempts that have been made to drug telomerase. Most don't seem to work well, but at-lease one is in trials (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02426086). Off the top of my head, there have been tests to see if some antivirals might poison telomerase since it's a reverse transcriptase. There have been attempts to stabilize G-quadruplex DNA to prevent telomerase's association with the 5' and of the telomere. The problem is that there are many non-telomeric regions that are affected by these drugs, and these drugs might interfere with telomere replication as well as telomerase activity. There have been attempts to use antisense oligomers to prevent the association of telomerase with the telomere (Geron), but these kinds of molecules have bioavailability issues -- though it seems that Geron has a partial solution by chemically modifying the Oligo (Imetelstat).
The idea of interfering with components of the shelterin complex in an attempt to render cancer cells mortal strikes me as dangerous. The shelterin complex prevents rampant genomic instability that can be caused by aberrant 'repair' of the telomeres. TRF1 might not be the most important part of the shelterin complex, but TRF1 is important for cellular biology. It may be involved in DNA repair and replication, and KO of TRF1 can be bad news for cells (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22932806).
The idea of drugging TRF1, which is suggested in the Science Daily article you're asking about (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150513083727.htm), seems doubly iffy. TRF1 binds to DNA via a Myb domain. Myb domains are fairly common in the human proteome. While it's possible that Blasco/CNIO has a specific TRF1 Myb binding inhibitor, I'd be worried about it affecting the binding of other Myb domain containing proteins (e.g. TRF2). An allosteric inhibitor might be better, but that requires additional screening.
On the upside, Myb domains aren't extremely conserved, so I guess a potent and TRF1 specific inhibitor may be possible.
If we consider some of the recent findings ( please go through the attached papers) , then definitely it is possible to reprogram cancer cells into normal cells. Hope this will help you.
Hi Arash,
Yes, that is possible for some cancer cells, but not all , even those are derived from the same tumour, why is that? because of the heterogeneous nature of the cancer cell population.
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