Cancer is among the leading cause of death worldwide. Due to the casualties, a significant number of studies have been dedicated to finding the best solution to ending this dreaded disease. A new study gives hope that this is possible.

Cancer Statistics

According to statistics, in 2008, an estimated of 169.3 million years of healthy life were lost globally due to cancer. In 2012, there were 14.1 million new cases of cancer worldwide. The four most common cancers are lung cancer, breast cancer, bowel cancer and prostate cancer.

New Therapeutic Pathway

A new study from Tel Aviv University is promising. It gives hope that soon, cancer will finally be controlled. The study reveals that cancer cells can be switched off or kept dormant. The same study comes with new nanomedicines that will keep cancer cells harmless.

Prof. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, Head of TAU's Cancer Angiogenesis and Nanomedicine Laboratory started the concept of this new discovery.

Osteosarcoma Study

According to Satchi-Fainaro, they wanted to turn the cancer cells off. "We want to keep the cancer 'switch' turned off," she said. "Once osteosarcoma metastasizes away from the primary tumor site, there is no effective treatment, just different ways of prolonging life."

Osteosarcoma is a cancer that develops in the bones and is one of the most aggressive types of cancer. Osteosarcoma tumors may reappear in worse conditions. The cancerous cells that are left after surgery may suddenly turn on, which causes the illness to reappear again. In other instances, those mini-tumors that were undetected "reemerge as large macro-metastases, primarily in the lungs."

So, Satchi-Fainaro and the team wanted to determine what "switch[es] on" the cancer cells. The health expert believes that as long as the cancer cells remain dormant they will be manageable. She described their approach to be very optimistic and added that it can be applied to other types of cancers.

The scientists utilized mice to carry out their study. They created model pairs of osteosarcoma tumor tissues with both silent and progressive cancer in the creatures and looked for potential differences. They connected the microRNAs in the tissue and noticed a significant contrast between the aggressive and dormant tumors.

In the aggressive tumor, the three microRNAs were expressed at low levels. However, in the dormant tumor, they were expressed at high levels.

The Discovery of Cancer Cells' Switch

The researchers implanted microRNA into the tumor tissues and they observed that the tissue's malignancy had reduced. It had diminished the cancer cell's abilities to affect the normal cells.

"We saw that the osteosarcoma cells treated with the selected microRNAs were unable to recruit blood vessels to feed their growth," Satchi-Fainaro said. To make the microRNAs stable, it needs to be encapsulated in nanoparticles. They designed nanomedicine with a "special activation method at the tumor site in the target cell."

"The mice treated with the nanomedicine lived for six months, which is the equivalent of 25-odd human years," she said. "This makes us very optimistic. If we cannot teach tumor cells to be normal, we can teach them to be dormant."

The study is published in the journal ACS Nano.