SA medical researchers dig deep in quest for improved lung cancer treatment
South African medical researchers are on a drive to enhance lung cancer treatment methods.
Scientists at the iThemba Laboratories for Accelerator-Based Science (LABS) in Cape Town recently zoned in on improving the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer.
Statistics South Africa data shows between 2008 and 2018, cancer-related deaths in women increased by just over 34%, while mortalities in men went up by 24%.
World Health Organization statistics show that lung cancer was the leading cause of cancer deaths globally accounting for more than 1,8 million fatalities in 2020.
Non-small cell lung cancer is the formation of malignant cells in the lung tissue.
Charnay Cunningham conducts research in the laboratory and uses cancerous cells to study how they react after being exposed to a specific compound, followed by a form of radiation.
“That then gets investigated with different techniques of data collection, so it’s called an assay. Which is how you conduct an experiment…So we would then look at things that would be relevant to how the human system would respond to these kinds of treatment.”
Cunningham, a PhD student in cancer and radiation research at iThemba and Stellenbosch University, explained her research team was investigating substances that would make cancer cells more sensitive to radiotherapy, which could result in more effective treatment.
“What we are trying to achieve is to radiosensitise the cells to radiation. What a radiosensitiser is, is any substance that is capable of rendering a cell or cancer type more sensitive to whichever type of radiation you apply to it.”
“The big idea is you would normally treat patients with cancer with radiation and it is quite curative in a lot of types of cancers, but in lung cancer specifically.
“In non-small cell lung cancer there’s a level of radio-resistance, which means that even though you apply radiation because there’s a level of radio-resistance to the treatment, it will not be as effective as intended due to this. So, by applying a radiosensitiser you can then improve the efficacy of the treatment or the radiation.”
Cunningham said scientists used a compound called endostatin for this laboratory-based study.
“An endostatin is actually a protein that is naturally produced in the human body. What they have done to it is made it a recombinant protein which is just taking a little snippet of the DNA that codes for the protein and that allows you to grow this in a lab or create it in a lab and actually create a lot more of the protein itself so you are not reliant on the human body to generate enough protein for effective treatment.”
Advances in medical science hold the promise of improving diagnostic tools and refining treatment methods that offer doctors a bigger pool of techniques to draw from in their strive to offer patients a greater chance at survival.
-EWN
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