Scientists of the California Institute of Technology (California Institute of Technology) used a fundamentally new approach to the destruction of cancer cells. The process developed by the associate professor of the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Bioengineering Niles Pierce and his colleagues uses small RNA molecules that can be programmed to attack only specific cancer cells. Changing their form, these molecules then cause their self-destruction, as reported by the Internet publication for girls and women from 14 to 35 years Pannochka. Net With conventional cancer chemotherapy, patients receive drugs that destroy not only cancer cells. For example, anticancer drugs often attack rapidly multiplying cells, since accelerated fission is a hallmark of most cancer cells. Unfortunately, rapid division is also a property of normal cells of the bone marrow, gastrointestinal tract and hair follicles. Therefore, all these cells also die, which leads to a number of severe side effects.

A much better method, says Pearce, is to create drugs that can distinguish cancer cells from healthy ones and then, when these cells are labeled, make them targets for destruction. In other words, it is necessary to obtain molecules that diagnose cancer cells before they are destroyed. This method of therapy will relieve patients of the side effects associated with conventional chemotherapy. It can be adapted to individual tumors at the molecular level, which will make treatment uniquely selective.

In an article that should appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Pierce and his colleagues describe exactly this process. It uses molecules that have the shape of a female hairpin, known as small conditional RNA (small conditional RNA). The length of such RNA is less than 30 base pairs, while the average gene consists of thousands of nucleotide pairs.

The method involves the use of two different small conditioned RNAs.

One of them binds to an RNA sequence, unique to a particular cancer cell - for example, glioblastoma cells, an aggressive brain tumor, since it is complimentary to it. To contact this cancer mutation, the "hairpin" of the RNA should unfold by transferring the molecule from one form to another, which in turn makes available a sequence that spontaneously binds to the second type of RNA "hairpin". Then, opening the second hairpin opens access to the sequence that is associated with the first type of hairpin and so on.

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