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Indo-American develops possible cure for cancer
Seema Hakhu Kachru / PTI
Saturday, January 06, 2007 21:11 IST
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HOUSTON: Indian-American Gopalan Sampathkumar and his biomedical engineering team at Johns Hopkins University have developed a possible cure for cancer that involves sugar and fat.
It is a designer two-pronged molecular weapon made of sugars and fatty acids that kills cancer cells in lab tests by joining a sugar to a short-chain fatty acid compound. The researchers cautioned that their double-punch molecule, described in the December issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, has not yet been tested on animals or humans. Nevertheless, they believe it represents a promising new strategy for fighting the deadly disease.
?For a long time, cancer researchers did not pay much attention to the use of sugars in fighting cancer,? said Gopalan Sampathkumar, a postdoctoral fellow in the university?s Department of Biomedical Engineering and lead author of the journal article. ?But we found that when the right sugar is matched with the right chemical partner, it can deliver a powerful double-whammy against cancer cells.?
Sampathkumar and his colleagues built upon 20-year-old findings that a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate can slow the spread of cancer cells. In the 1980s, researchers discovered that butyrate, which is formed naturally at high levels in the digestive system by symbiotic bacteria that feed on fibre, can restore healthy cell functioning. Efforts to use butyrate as a general drug for tumours elsewhere in the body, however, have been hindered by the high doses of the compound needed to effectively eradicate cancer.
The researchers focused on a sugar called N-acetyl-D-mannosamine, or ManNAc, for short. The team created a hybrid molecule by linking ManNAc with butyrate. The hybrid easily penetrates a cell?s surface, then is split apart by enzymes inside the cell. Once inside the cell, ManNAc is processed into another sugar known as sialic acid that plays key roles in cancer biology, while butyrate orchestrates the expression of genes responsible for halting the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells.
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