Photo by National Cancer Institute/ Unsplash
Israeli scientists have made yet another breakthrough in the treatment of cancer. Researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) destroyed 90% of the multiple myeloma blood cancer cells under laboratory conditions, and 60% in human tissues taken from patients at Rabin Medical Center (Belinson Hospital), using an RNA-based drug delivered to the cells by targeted lipid nanoparticles.
Israeli high-tech firms and scientists have always been at the forefront of medical research and breakthroughs including cancer. UroGen, an Israeli medtech firm developing new cancer treatments, recently announced positive phase 3 trial news for its second product UGN-102, a bladder cancer therapy. And TAU scientists made another cancer treatment breakthrough earlier this month when they, for the first time in history, succeeded in encoding a toxin produced by bacteria into mRNA (messenger RNA) molecules that can literally make cancer cells poison themselves. Once delivered directly to cancer cells, these particles cause the cells to produce the toxin themselves, eventually killing them.
The researchers at TAU developed lipid-based nanoparticles (similar to those used in the COVID-19 vaccine) containing RNA molecules that silence the gene CKAP5, encoding cytoskeleton-associated protein 5. With this protein inhibited the cancer cell is unable to divide, which essentially kills it. To avoid damaging noncancerous cells, the nanoparticles were coated with antibodies that guided them specifically to the cancer cells inside the bone marrow.
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The breakthrough was achieved by a group of researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Rabin Medical Center, led by Prof. Dan Peer, a pioneer in the development of RNA therapeutics and Head of the Nanomedicine Laboratory at the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research, also serving as TAU’s VP R&D, and by PhD student Dana Tarab-Ravski. The results were published in the leading journal Advanced Science.
Dana Tarab-Ravski explains: “Multiple myeloma is a blood cancer usually found in the older population. While most blood cancers appear in the blood stream or lymph nodes and spread from there to the rest of the body, multiple myeloma cells appear and form tumors inside the bone marrow – and are therefore very hard to reach.”
The study’s findings are very encouraging: under laboratory conditions, where cells are grown in flasks, the nanoparticles developed by the researchers eradicated about 90% of the cancer cells. At the second stage, the new treatment was tested on cancer samples taken from multiple myeloma patients at the haemato-oncological ward of the Rabin Medical Center. The success rate in these samples was 60%. Testing the ability of the nanoparticles to reach the bone marrow in an animal model, the researchers found that after a single injection the RNA had penetrated to 60% of the multiple myeloma cancer cells in the bone marrow. Lastly, examining the therapeutic effectiveness of the nanoparticles in the animal model resulted in eradication of two thirds of the cancer cells, and the animals showed significant improvement in all clinical indicators.
