3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
Actually, numerous new advancements have been made towards cancer treatments in recent years. We're getting better and better at using CRISPR to treat these sort of things. I know CRISPR has been around for a while, but the issue with it is still off-target effects. To use CRISPR, it needs to have a specially defined sgRNA primer sequence, which it uses to recognize certain areas of the genome. The problem with this is: human genomes are big, and CRISPR isn't perfect. Additionally, if your sgRNA sequence has a lot of similarity with a sequence found it healthy cells, CRISPR will activate on all of your genes nonspecifically. For cancer treatments, we need to select certain genes that are overexpressed, in that they are not found in healthy cells, which is difficult, because the side effects from knocking down an important gene in healthy cells can be catastrophic.
The other major problem for glioblastoma specifically is the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). Generally, drug transport is highly limited in brain tissue, so even if we are able to develop a drug that works, it needs to spread properly, and the BBB often prevents that. Because of this, we need to develop therapies not only able to kill the cancer, but also able to permeate this barrier. However, certain advancements have been made, as shown by research by both Zou et al 2022[1] as well as Ruan et al 2022[2], both utilizing a nanoparticle delivery system encapsulating a CRISPR treatment.
1: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm8011
2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36174804/
The third challenge is that glioblastoma is incredibly aggressive. It spreads rapidly, and recent research, such as this paper by Munford et al 2022[3], has also aimed to understand how cancerous glial cells migrate on a molecular level. Hopefully, this knowledge can be utilized to aid in therapies to slow spread of glioblastoma while a combination of effective therapies to kill cancer cells can be administered.
3: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35158845/
Despite these advancements, unfortunately, the ability to "cure cancer" is not something that we can feasibly achieve with these types of cancers. At least to our knowledge, no one therapy can be guaranteed to completely eliminate a cancer with anywhere close to 100% efficacy at every stage, especially one as aggressive as glioblastoma. However, with recent advancements, I would predict that prognosis upon initial diagnosis, especially early stage, will improve dramatically in the next few decades.
Comment by alien101010 at 19/01/2024 at 03:12 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you so much for the thoughtful reply.