I got all alliterative on the title there… but I’m really excited to share a story I read about research that uses a compound treatment to target melanoma cells but spares the healthy skin cells.
The research was led by two scientists working out of Penn State College of Medicine and was recently published in the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. As noted in a previous post, BRAF inhibitor resistance is a problem treating melanoma since the treatments become ineffective after a period of less than a year. To combat this issue, the researchers looked at various compounds that might work in tandem, using what they referred to as a “fragment-based design”.
Moiety, or molecule fragment, is the key to developing this compound, called napthalamide-isoselenocyanate (NISC-6). Let’s break down what each part of the compound is.
As you may know, cruciferous veggies (which means that it comes from the Cruciferae or the mustard family of plants and not, contrary to popular belief meaning “makes you gassy as hell” in Latin) have been touted as having anti-cancer properties. Plants belonging to this family include broccoli, Brussels spouts, cabbage, and my least favorite veggie of all time, kale. Isothiocyanates are anti-cancer chemicals that can be naturally found in cruciferous vegetables, but scientists don’t think that by just eating truckloads of the veggies can you cure cancer (and honestly, if all you ate were these vegetables, you would be passing gas so much no one would want to be around you anyway).
So the researchers combined the isoselenocyanate moiety with another compound referred to as napthalamide moiety of mitonafide. Napthalamide is a topoisomersase II alpha inhibitor. What the heck does that mean? Basically, it halts the replication of DNA in cancer. And since you don’t want cancer to replicate, shutting down the mechanism is exactly what you do want. Unfortunately, mitonafide on its own is pretty toxic.
The scientists tinkered with the formulation of the combination of the two to reduce toxicity and then ran tests on mice. In that test, tumors were reduced by 69 percent! “We designed it for easy elimination from the body, so, consequently, toxicity should be reduced,” says Professor Sharma, one of the authors of the study. And a further encouraging development is that this compound might help overcome the resistance issue mentioned earlier.
BRAF mutant melanoma cells can be targeted with current medications; but BRAF wild type melanoma cells are harder to attack. The NISC-6 compound targets both types, with the added firepower of halting the replication of the cancer DNA. Scientists haven’t pinpointed exactly how the compound works, but the study results show that it does work in their trials. Obviously, the next step is to see if humans can tolerate the compound and whether it works the same way in people as it does in mice.
And the really cool thing? They think that it will work against other types of cancers as well, which is great news for all of us as it seems that no matter who you are – cancer will touch someone you love eventually.