'Drug factories' may be key to eliminating cancer
SAN ANTONIO (Ivanhoe Newswire) — About 20,000 women will be told they have ovarian cancer this year, and almost 13,000 will die from it.
It’s a hard cancer to treat, but researchers are hoping something called "drug factories" will not only kill ovarian cancer, but also transform the way we think about treating other diseases.
Gilda Michel remembers how she felt before she got her diagnosis.
"I was losing a lot of weight. My stomach was not getting any smaller. It was hurting a lot," she said.
It turned out to be worse than she thought.
"I had tumors in my ovaries," Michel said.
Even with chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, for people like Michel, diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, there’s a 50-50 chance they’ll survive it.
Researchers at Rice University are trying out a new implantable approach. Rice University bioengineer Omid Veiseh described how it works.
“Have this implant actually be loaded with engineered cells, that would secrete a biologic that would activate the immune system," Veiseh said.
Bioengineers implanted drug factories – the size of a pinhead – to deliver continuous, high doses of interleukin-2, a natural compound that activates white blood cells to fight cancer.
“Where we need the drug is actually right next to the tumor,” Veiseh said.
Preliminary studies in mice showed it works.
"We've shown that in as little as six days, we see the cancer completely gone," Veiseh said.
It eliminated the tumors in 100% of the animals with ovarian cancer. When the mice were injected a second time with the cells from the same cancerous tumor, they were protected against it.
"Which suggests that the immune cells that have learned what the cancer looks like, they can now migrate throughout the body, find and destroy the cancer, wherever it may be," Veiseh said, giving survivors like Michel new hope that they will beat this deadly disease.
The implant is administered just once, but the drug factories keep making the dose every day until the cancer is eliminated. Human clinical trials could begin as soon as this fall.
Researchers said they believe drug factories could change the way we treat not only cancer, but type one diabetes, immune diseases, and genetic disorders.