Washington, Sep 18 (IANS) A team of researchers has developed a new drug carrier that targets a tumour directly, which requires an ample supply of blood to stay alive.
Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, physiologist at Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Sackler School of Medicine, and her team developed the new drug.

Satchi-Fainaro believes that her technology can also combat resistance to anti-cancer drugs like Taxol, keeping other normal healthy cells around the tumour safe.

Her innovative drug delivery system delivers compounds, known to stop blood vessel growth, to cancerous tumours.

The findings, she says, could be applied to any tumour type and work to improve the efficacy of today’s anti-cancer drugs.

Satchi-Fainaro’s research is based on an understanding of the parasitic behaviour of cancer. Most of us have small tumours the size of pin heads which are dormant and asymptomatic.

Then, at some point, cancer cells proliferate and the tumour grows in mass. At that point the tumour cells migrate to the bones and start recruiting blood vessels using a chemical attractant in order to draw blood for their continued growth in a process called angiogenesis.

Researchers looked into the chemical that causes the blood, or endothelial cells, to gravitate to the activated, newly malignant cancer cells.

Armed with this information, “we can turn cancer into a chronic manageable disease”, says Satchi-Fainaro.

The study was published in the journals Angewandte Chemie and PLoS One.