United States: Cancer has been identified as one of the most difficult diseases to combat as tumors grow a kind of immunity that enables them to outdo drugs meant for their elimination.
But, appearing now, a group of scientists has developed a deceptive new plan on how cancer cells can be tricked into committing suicide and forcing them to turn against each other.
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Two new “switches” have been created, with the first one having the ability to let engineered cells overgrow and even dominate the rest of the cancer cells upon administration of a particular drug.
The second switch then sets off a toxin that only affects the modified cells that have become dominant and any unmodified neighboring cells with them, as techspot.com reported.
This system, described as the “dual switch selection gene drive” in a study published in Nature Biotechnology, confronts a major dilemma facing cancer therapies.

As a result, cancer cells are notably marked with some level of ability to resist the effects of the therapy administered to them.
Cells can inactivate the drugs, neutralize the pathways the drugs would act on, or do other things to survive.
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In light of this, doctors rely on the use of drug combinations to destroy cancerous tissues with different mechanisms of action. However, the options are rare, particularly in growing difficult-to-treat malignancies where useful therapeutic directives are missing, as techspot.com reported.
The new technique is formulated in an entirely new fashion and is predominantly different from the past method. Rather than discovering new drugs or targets, it decreases the ability of the tumor to continuously mutate and use that against it.

In the experiments proving their findings, the researchers employed lung cancer cell lines and erlotinib drug. Generally, erlotinib inhibits the activation of the EGFR protein, which triggers the process of uncontrollable cell division.
However, the scientists used the first “suicide gene” to engineer lung cancer cells to reverse erlotinib’s effects and result in resistance and progression when exposed to the drug.
When using erlotinib on the base of the culture that comprised modified and unmodified carcinoma cells, the modified cells, which were edited in the lab, became predominant in the tumor sample soon after the treatment.
Drug usage was stopped by the researchers once the supplemented condition was attained.