Anti-fungal drugs can actually fight cancer MIT team is pushing new anti-cancer drugs

Oxygen is essential for our survival.

For example, when a gene mutation occurs in a cell, the cell will sharply increase hydrogen peroxide to disrupt cell function, which is a protective mechanism to eliminate abnormal cells

Although some signal regulation during tumor growth requires hydrogen peroxide, if the level is too high, they will not be able to sustain it and die

However, researchers in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology realized that this balance is actually very fragile.

Adding compounds has become the easiest way to increase hydrogen peroxide, but we need a sensor to show the changes in the level of hydrogen peroxide before and after the medication

The research team designed an enzyme peroxiredoxin-2 four years ago, which can reflect changes in hydrogen peroxide through fluorescence

▲The elevated level of hydrogen peroxide can be seen under a fluorescence microscope (picture source: reference [1], Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

In their new study published in "Cell Chemistry and Biology", the authors screened a compound library containing 600 small molecules, which have been approved by the U.

They first designed cancer cells that contained sensors, and then added compounds to these cells so that they could determine which drugs actually worked by observing changes in fluorescence

▲Schematic diagram of the screening process (picture source: reference [2])

Some compounds can even play a role in killing cancer cells

Among them is a compound called SMER3, which was originally an antifungal drug, but it can significantly increase the level of hydrogen peroxide inside cancer cells

Knowing this information, Dr.

Researchers speculate that in addition to the level of reactive oxygen species that has an impact on the survival of cancer cells, other reactive nitrogen and sulfur components may also have similar effects, which are new directions for anti-cancer therapies that are worth continuing to explore in the future

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Reference materials:

[1] New screening method targets hydrogen peroxide in the search for new cancer therapeutics.

[2] Yining Hao et al, Screening compound libraries for H2O2-mediated cancer therapeutics using a peroxiredoxin-based sensor, Cell Chemical Biology (2021).