Scientists from Yale University (USA) have developed a new method for the treatment of various types of tumors using gene editing technology (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). The results of the research were published by the journal. Science.
Healthy human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but nearly all cancer cells have extra chromosomes, making the total number of chromosomes odd.
“We’ve been working on aneuploidy for a long time, but we couldn’t effect changes in chromosome number. With the help of CRISPR, we were able to remove chromosomes from cancer cells without affecting healthy tissue,” said study author Jason Scheltzer.
The authors of the study created a technology for editing aneuploidy based on the CRISPR method. With its help, scientists were able to remove the extra chromosomes from a cancer cell – this caused them to lose their tumor-forming ability.
They also conducted an additional experiment to confirm the effectiveness of the method. The authors mixed healthy and aneuploid cancer cells, with the latter accounting for 20% of the cells. After a while, the second, mutated cells occupied 75% of the Petri dish. At the same time, their number dropped to 4% if the authors used the developed method of treatment.
The results are preliminary and will require clinical studies as well as in vivo cell testing to assess the potential risks of such therapy.
ancient scientists created dyes for the treatment of cancer based on hair dye.