Researchers induce cancer cells to 'commit suicide' with a self-produced bacterial toxin (phys.org)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For the first time in the world researchers at Tel Aviv University have encoded a toxin produced by bacteria into mRNA (messenger RNA) molecules and delivered these particles directly to cancer cells, causing the cells to produce the toxin—which eventually killed them with a success rate of 50%.

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

This sounds promising! Killing cancer while leaving other cells alone is some seriously good news.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

mRNA is a hot topic for some portion of the population lol

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

crisper-cas9!

Theranostics is a great word.

Since this seems to rely on the immune system to deliver the therapy anyway, I'm wondering how it's outperforming whatever mechanism the immune system would use instead.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'm guessing immune cells deliver a signal to trigger apoptosis, but cancer cells usually mutate to quash that mechanism or break its function somehow.

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023

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