[celltalk]

I haven’t read the paper yet but the news article seemed a bit, meeh.

BCL-2 inhibitors, mainly Venetoclax, is used in cancer therapies quite often which also triggers cell apoptosis and it’s very effective. It was also designed to target B-cell related cancers, but it found to be so effective that FDA approved it to be used in primary cases of Acute Myeloid Leukemia. So, killing cancer with triggerring apoptosis is very well known. I think the novel part might be the two protein, so it is probably more targeted for metabolic activities… but yeah didn’t read the paper yet.

Anyways, for the side effects a major one could be Tumor Lysis Syndrome (TLS). Basically, if you apoptose the cancer cells super fast, the molecules from those cells spread everywhere and it becomes toxic for the patient. This is at least the case for Venetoclax.

[sylware]

How much cancerous cells are similar to let us know how to target them and deliver a payload?

I guess some payload delivering mechanisms expect very 'standard' features from cancer cells?

[inglor_cz]

Cancerous cells are fairly diverse across individuals, or even within a single individual, and many biological treatments require precise sequencing of the tumor DNA of that individual patient to adjust and work. In some cancers, there is a nasty "Russian roulette" effect in play, where a certain treatment may be extremely efficient (in practice a cure, even though oncologists avoid that word) in people with a certain mutation and totally useless in others, even though from the macroscopic point of view, their tumors look the same.

[sylware]

Then, basically, each cancer, cancer cells should be sequenced, then based on the type of cell and DNA sequencing, we have a list of "tools" to deliver payload to those very cells (without delivering such payload to sane cells, ofc)?

[inglor_cz]

That would be the ideal scenario, yes.

In practice, we can only make use of some known mutations. Not just for delivering chemicals, but also for "teaching" the immune system to attack such cells, which, once it is able to recognize them, it will do vigorously.

Let's hope that this catalogue will grow until it covers at least all the typical cases.