
Most of the time, cancer cells do a combination of two things: they overexpress genes that drive tumor growth and they lose normal genes that typically suppress tumors. No two tumors are exactly alike, but some combination of these two effects is usually what results in cancer. Now, for the first time, researchers have shown that it’s possible to treat cancer by delivering a gene that naturally suppresses tumors.
Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center combined their cancer biology and nanomaterials expertise and developed a therapeutic capable of delivering a tumor suppressor gene known as PTEN, the loss of which can allow tumors to grow unchecked.
In several preclinical models, their PTEN–boosting therapeutic was able to inhibit tumor growth. Their findings were published yesterday in Nature Biomedical Engineering. …