At the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion, a new approach to cancer treatments is presented: combining drugs at the nanometer level within metasynergy - biological and chemical synergy
A model developed in the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion - "medicinal meta-synergy" - was found to be effective in a pre-clinical trial Researchers at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Technion present a new approach to cancer treatments: combining drugs at the nanometer level within meta-synergy - biological and chemical synergy.
The research published in the Journal of Controlled Release was led by PhD student Dana Miron Azagouri, Dr. Yossi Shamai and Ben Friedman Glick, a master's degree student.
Cancer is a general name for a group of diseases characterized by accelerated and uncontrolled cell division. The chemotherapy treatments for cancer were already developed more than 80 years ago and since then there have been considerable improvements, and along with them new treatments have been developed including radiation, immunotherapy and biological treatments. One of the accepted approaches in cancer treatment today is a combination of drugs - a synergy of different drugs. The controlled use of several drugs at the same time creates an effect that exceeds the sum of its parts, that is, the cumulative benefit of the various drugs, and may also prevent the tumor from developing resistance to treatment. The Technion researchers took the synergistic concept a step further and present in their article a new approach: medicinal meta-synergy. According to Dr. Shamai, "by the term meta-synergy we mean that the molecules we developed demonstrate biological and chemical synergy at the same time. In other words, they not only achieve the desired (biological) healing effect when combined with each other, but also know how to connect together in a process of self-assembly out of chemical synergy.
In addition, the said combination reduces the side effects of the drug. The meta-synergy between the different drug particles was also provided by 1,985 "recipes" for synergistic drugs nanometers for 70 types of cancer. Out of all the proposals, the researchers discovered that the pair of anti-cancer drugs bortezomib-cabozantinib (the first approved for blood cancers, the second approved for liver, kidney and thyroid cancers) exhibits chemical stability, high levels of efficacy, efficient distribution in the body and a level of toxicity Following this conclusion, they tested the effectiveness of this combination in head and neck cancer in an animal model and demonstrated that their prediction works - The aforementioned combination is indeed effective, spreads well in the body and its level of toxicity is low, which is reflected in the small number of side effects.
Surprisingly, when injecting each drug individually, there are more side effects than injecting the combination self-assembled into particles. Creating metasynergy at the nanometer level is a very complex challenge," explains Dr. Shamai, "because it requires the introduction of two drugs (at least) into the same carrier that carries them to the desired destination in the body. Our research shows, even in the computational demonstration (chemo-informatics and artificial intelligence ) and in an animal model experiment, because the combination we created does lead the drugs to the tumor and releases them there, and that this treatment is very effective in treating the disease, beyond the specific combination we demonstrated in the article We believe that the concept of meta-synergy is expected to lead to further breakthroughs in the fight against cancer.
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One response
According to your research, can it be tried on humans?
I'm ready to try!