Hyderabad: Scientists at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) have come up with two pioneering researches in the field of cancer treatment.
One is the development of an in vivo DNA-based therapeutic vaccine to be used in the treatment.
The vaccine has a DNA with tumour antigens encoded, which once injected, enters the dendritic cells of the patient and activates the T cells, which then attack and kill cancer cells.
Dr Arabinda Chaudhuri, chief scientist, biomaterials division, IICT said, “Cancer immunotherapy and targeted chemotherapy have to be used in combination. Till now immunotherapy involved extracting dendritic cells from a patient's body, activating the T cells and injecting them into the patient, which was painful and also time consuming.”
Using a combination of targeted chemotherapy and cancer immunotherapy helped in curing melanoma, liver and colorectal cancer in 50 days in mice without a relapse.
However, pancreatic, lung and brain cancers could not be cured though the survival rate increased.
The other major discovery at IICT has been finding a path for drugs to directly enter cancer stem cells and kill them from inside.
Dr Rajkumar Banerjee, principal scientist, biomaterials division, IICT, said whenever drugs are given to a cancer patient, stem cells of the cancer, numbering a few hundred billion, develop resistance and become dormant.
After the treatment, these stem cells activate and generate more cancer cells resistant to those drugs and the patient relapses. These stem cells being less in number are difficult to target and even more difficult to kill.
Dr Banerjee found that if the drugs are laced with Glucocortoid receptors, they are attracted by cells in the body. However, only the Glucocortoids in cancer cells have the ability to allow the big-sized drug molecules to enter. Once the drug enters the Glucocortoid of cancer cells, it reaches the cell's nucleus and kills it.
IICT is in talks with Mayo Clinic, USA for going for Phase-I clinical trials involving human subjects as pre-clinical trials have proven successful.
