Scientists found a new way to stop a harmful protein that’s in lung, breast, and colon cancers.
They made a medicine that might help treat pancreatic cancer, which usually can’t be cured.
This new medicine changes a sneaky mutation in cancer cells, called K-Ras G12D. This mutation causes nearly half of all pancreatic cancers and some lung, breast, and colon cancers.
Pancreatic cancer isn’t as common as other cancers, but it’s more deadly because there aren’t many treatments. It kills over 50,000 people each year in the United States.
“We’ve been working hard for ten years to find better treatments for pancreatic cancer,” said Kevan Shokat, a professor who led the research. “This breakthrough is a big step forward in fighting this tough mutation.”
The discovery was published on March 5, 2024, in a journal called Nature Chemical Biology.
Shokat and his team made the first drugs to stop another K-Ras mutation, G12C, in 2013. But those drugs didn’t help much with pancreatic cancer.
K-Ras mutations are common in pancreatic cancer, causing 90% of cases. Half of these mutations are G12D, which is a bit different from other K-Ras mutations.
“It was really hard to find molecules that could tell the difference between the cancer-causing part and the normal part,” Shokat said. “We needed drugs that only worked on the cancer cells and didn’t hurt healthy cells.”
They finally found a molecule that worked. It locked onto the cancer-causing part of the protein and stopped it from working. And it didn’t harm healthy cells.
Now, they’re improving the molecule to make it strong enough to fight cancer in people. Shokat thinks new treatments for pancreatic cancer could start being tested in about two to three years.
“We’ve learned a lot from other treatments, so we can move quickly to test this new medicine,” said Margaret Tempero, a doctor at UCSF Pancreas Center. “A good drug for K-Ras G12D could really help people with pancreatic cancer.”
source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240305134402.htm