It doesn't seem possible. But they say it's
true. A small team of Israeli scientists is telling the world they will have
the first “complete cure” for cancer within a year, The Jerusalem Post reported on
Monday. And not only that, but they claim it will be brief, cheap and effective
and will have no or minimal side-effects.
“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a
complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, chairman of the board of Accelerated
Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), a company founded in 2000 in
the ITEKincubator in the Kiryat Weizmann Science Park in Ness
Ziona, Israel, just north of the Weizmann Institute of Science in
Rehovot, Israel. A development-stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in
discovery and development of therapeutic peptides, AEBi developed the SoAP
platform, a combinatorial biology screening platform technology, which provides
functional leads—agonist, antagonist, inhibitor, etc.—to very difficult
targets.
“Our cancer cure will be effective from day
one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal
side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,”
Aridor said. “Our solution will be both generic and personal.”
Called MuTaTo (multi-target toxin),
researchers said the drug is essentially "on the scale of a cancer
antibiotic–a disruption technology of the highest order."
Currently in development by AEBi under the
leadership of CEO Dr. Ilan Morad, the
potential game-changer in the world-wide fight against cancer will use a
combination of cancer-targeting peptides and a toxin that will specifically
kill cancer cells.
The Jerusalem Post reported that the anti-cancer drug is
based on AEBi's so-called SoAP technology, which belongs to the phage display
group of technologies. With it, “scientists introduce DNA coding for a protein,
such as an antibody, into a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. The
protein is then displayed on the surface of the phage. Researchers can use
these protein-displaying phages to screen for interactions with other proteins,
DNA sequences and small molecules.”
A team of scientists won the Nobel Prize last
year for their work on phage display in the directed evolution of new proteins
– in particular, for the production of antibody therapeutics, The
Jerusalem Post reported. “AEBi is doing something similar but with
peptides, compounds of two or more amino acids linked in a chain.” According to
Morad, peptides have several advantages over antibodies, including that they
are smaller, cheaper, and easier to produce and regulate.
According to an article in Elsevier’s Science Direct, peptide therapeutics have played a notable
role in medicine since the advent of insulin therapy in the 1920s. “Over 60
peptide drugs are approved in the United States and other major markets, and
peptides continue to enter clinical development at a steady pace,” the article
states.
The International Agency for Research on
Cancer (IARC) of the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the
global cancer burden to have risen to 18.1 million new cases and 9.6
million deaths in 2018. The IARC reports 1 in 5 men and 1 in 6 women worldwide
develop cancer during their lifetime, and 1 in 8 men and 1 in 11 women die from
the disease. In addition, every sixth death in the world is due to cancer,
making it the second leading cause of death, second only to cardiovascular
disease.
Morad said in its infancy, AEBi was
essentially “doing what everyone else was doing, trying to discover individual
novel peptides for specific cancers.”
But then Morad and his colleague, Dr. Hanan Itzhaki, began attempting to
identify why other cancer-killing drugs and treatments didn’t work or
eventually failed. And they say they’ve found a way to counter that effect.
Morad said most anti-cancer drugs attack a
specific target on or in the cancer cell. “Inhibiting the target usually
affects a physiological pathway that promotes cancer. Mutations in the targets
– or downstream in their physiological pathways – could make the targets not
relevant to the cancer nature of the cell, and hence the drug attacking it is
rendered ineffective,” he told The Jerusalem Post.
“In contrast, MuTaTo is using a combination of
several cancer-targeting peptides for each cancer cell at the same time,
combined with a strong peptide toxin that would kill cancer cells
specifically,” Morad said. “By using at least three targeting peptides on the
same structure with a strong toxin, we made sure that the treatment will not be
affected by mutations; cancer cells can mutate in such a way that targeted
receptors are dropped by the cancer.”
“The probability of having multiple mutations
that would modify all targeted receptors simultaneously decreases dramatically
with the number of targets used,” Morad continued. “Instead of attacking
receptors one at a time, we attack receptors three at a time – not even cancer
can mutate three receptors at the same time.”
According to Morad, many cancer cells activate
detoxification mechanisms when in stress from drugs and the cells pump out the
drugs or modify them to be non-functional. Morad told The Jerusalem
Post that detoxification takes time, and he’s banking on a strong
toxin that will have a high probability of killing the cancer cell before that
detoxification occurs.
“Many cytotoxic anticancer treatments aim at
fast-growing cells. But cancer stem cells are not fast growing, and they can
escape these treatments. Then, when the treatment is over, they can generate
cancer again,” The Jerusalem Post reported.
“If it does not completely annihilate the
cancer, the remaining cells can start to get mutations again, and then the
cancer comes back, but this time it is drug resistant,” Morad said.
Because cancer cells are born out of mutations
that occur in cancer stem cells, most of the over-expressed proteins which are
targeted on the cancer cell exist in the cancer stem cells. “MuTaTo’s
multiple-target attack ensures that they will be destroyed as well,” he said.
Finally, some cancer tumors can erect shields
which prohibit large molecules from accessing them. “MuTaTo acts like an
octopus or a piece of spaghetti and can sneak into places where other large
molecules cannot reach,” Morad said. “The peptide parts of MuTaTo are very
small (12 amino acids long) and lack a rigid structure. This should make the
whole molecule non-immunogenic in most cases and would enable repeated
administration of the drug.”
Morad said AEBi's discovery could also
decrease the sickening side-effects of most cancer treatments dramatically,
which are the result of drug treatments interacting with the wrong or
additional targets, or the correct targets but on non-cancerous cells. “He said
MuTaTo’s having a combination of several highly specific cancer-targeting
peptides on one scaffold for each type of cancer cell would increase the
specificity to the cancer cell due to the avidity effect. In addition, in most
cases, the non-cancer cells that have a protein in common with the cancer cells
do not over-express it.”
Morad equated the concept of MuTaTo to the
triple drug cocktail that has helped change AIDS “from being an automatic death
sentence to a chronic – but often manageable – disease.” Today people with AIDS
and HIV are carriers of the disease, but they are not sick anymore. And the
reason is the combination of drugs they are given.
“Today, AIDS patients take protease inhibitors
in combination with two other drugs called reverse transcriptase
inhibitors,” The Jerusalem Postreported. “The drug combination
disrupts HIV at different stages in its replication, restrains an enzyme
crucial to an early stage of HIV duplication and holds back another enzyme that
functions near the end of the HIV replication process.”
“We used to give AIDS patients several drugs,
but we would administer them one at a time,” Morad explained. “During the
course of treatment, the virus mutated, and the AIDS started attacking again.
Only when patients started using a cocktail, were they able to stop the
disease.”
According to Morad, the MuTaTo cancer
treatment will eventually be designed specifically for each person. A piece of
each patient’s biopsy will be given to the lab, which will then analyze it to
know which receptors are over-expressed, he said. “The individual would then be
administered exactly the molecule cocktail needed to cure his disease.”
But unlike with HIV and AIDS, where patients
must take the cocktail for the rest their lives, with MuTaTo, the cells would
be killed, and the patient could likely stop treatment after only a few weeks.
Aridor said AEBi is in the process of writing
patents on specific peptides, which will be a large bank of targeting toxin
peptides wholly owned and hard to break.
The company has finished exploratory mice
experiments, which “inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all
on healthy mice cells, in addition to several in-vitro trials,” The
Jerusalem Post reported.
Next, AEBi will begin a round of clinical
trials which could be completed within a few years and would make the treatment
available in specific cases.
“Our results are consistent and repeatable,”
Aridor said.
Robin Seaton Jefferson lives just outside of St. Louis with
her husband of 25 years and two daughters. Find her on Twitter and Facebook
@SeatonJefferson or contact her at rsjreporter@charter.net.
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