New Strategy for Blood Cancers

Some encouraging news from the good folks at Dana-Farber: researchers there have developed a peptide that seems to help override blood cancer cells' resistance to chemotherapy.

D-F issued a press release yesterday describing the research. In a nutshell, this is how it works:

The body's cells do not last forever.  When they are too old, or damaged, they seem to be programmed to die -- to kill themselves, really. The body activates a protein that shuts down the cells' mitochondria (the little power houses within the cell that keeps them going). No mitochondria, no cell life. (Imagine disabling the motor in your freezer; everything melts and spoils.) Lots of cancer treatments work by triggering these proteins in cancer cells, trying to get the cells to shut down and kill themselves.

But, oh, those tricky cancer cells. They find a way to ignore that protein, or intercept it before it can shut down the mitochondria. (Imagine someone screaming, "No! My ice cream!" and holding on to your leg before you can get to the freezer's motor. Now imagine a whole bunch of people holding your leg, because cancer cells develop multiple strategies for survival. Or, better, a whole line of people waiting to grab you once you shake one of them off on your long walk to the freezer.)

This treatment involves "stapling" a chemical to the shut-down protein. The chemical deactivates the cancer cells' signals, allowing the protein to shut down the mitochondria.

(It's too late to turn back now with this ridiculous freezer metaphor, so: imagine, as you approach that line of people ready to grab your leg, you have an 8 year old with a nerf gun and really good aim, riding on your back. As you approach each person in line, the 8 year old shoots them with the nerf gun, distracting them just enough that you can get to the next person in line, who suffers the same fate, until eventually, they all get out of the way and you can disable that freezer motor and ruin all of the ice cream and bags of corn and frozen Swedish meatballs inside. Which, you will remember, is actually cancer in this comparison.)

Anyway, it's a very promising treatment, especially for relapsed blood cancers (including lymphoma), which tend to increase their ability to resist with each recurrence. Still a VERY long ay to go before anything actually happens with it, but it certainly holds a lot of promise.

(And, by the way, this is just the kind of awesome research that gets funded when you give to the Pan Mass Challenge, which, as you may know, my brother will be riding in later in the summer. Feel free to help fund more awesome research.)