Sweet Spot

This is a fairly hard-to-read piece from the medical journal Blood called "Hitting the Sweet Spot for Lymphoma." I love the title, which is explained in the abstract: "Anyone who has ever played a racket sport, baseball, cricket, and/or golf can attest to experiencing the 'sweet spot'—that place where the least jolt is felt on contact." In cancer research, "hitting the sweet spot" means finding a targeted agent that will not do too much (or any) damage to healthy cells. Nice comparison.

In this article, the authors focus on a potentially new focus for binding agents to lymphoma cells. We know that a surface protein common to lymphoma cells is CD-22. (You will remember that Rituxin isd attracted to CD-20). CD-22 is special because it belongs to a group of proteins that especially attacted to a sugar called galactose. The researchers discovered that this property would allow a monoclonal antibody or even a chemotherapy other agent to attach to the CD-22 and work particularly well to kill the lymphoma cell. Even better, the CD-22 doesn't need to be very strong; even a small amount of the protein will be detected. Early testing has shown that this approach might be effective for four different types of lymphoma (not Follicular -- yet). All of this happens because of the protein-galactose attraction.

There are some potential problems, which I don't fully understand, but which seem to be manageable. The Big Picture is that this presents a new approach that may result in more efficient/less toxic treatments, since even traditional chemotherapies will be able to target cancer cells and leave healthy cells alone.

"Hitting the sweet spot" will happen because of the CD-22 attraction to the galactose sugar. Get it? "Sweet" spot? I love oncology humor....