Himal Health Contest #3 - Cancer [ Discovery of MCL1 antagonist molecule S63845]

khatisam4 (54)in #health • 7 years ago (edited)

Hello healthy steemians ! I am glad that I have now some topic to write on this steemit . As @himal has started his Health Contest project in a genuine way , I am participating here. To define cancer, According to me hearing the word cancer , has a lot of definitions in it just like defining a world which has various definitions. It can be defined from the cellular level to the molecular level.

Dividing lung cancer cell

Credit- National Institutes of Health

Cancer has been with us since the humanity began. The earliest cancer detected dates back to 1600BC which was about the breast cancer. Many Cells in your human body goes in their own business on daily basis in a very honorable way . World is of 6 billion people where there are in an order of 100 Trillion cells in a single human body. These cell may be your skin cell, lung cell , or any cells . When these cells go into bigger form or replicate in replacing the dead cells, it experience a mitosis activity making a perfect copy of each other. From this aspect of view, we have literally 1000 cells or more producing per day. There are other cells too in the neighborhood which transfers signals if other cells are growing too fast or big .This is called as a Contact Inhibition. When some tissue in a body has some defect or damaged, these kill themselves whose mechanism is know as Apoptosis. When the mutation in the DNA occurs in these cells , they get destroyed more often. These are not passed to the offspring I am talking about the human body cells, not the germ cells. So any cells when its mutated, they will either do nothing or malfunction and hurt us but, doesn't do any harm to the offspring .When there is abrupt replication of cells rather than death of cells, malignancy /cancer/tumor occurs !

But When its invade to the adjacent organs and unfortunately becomes life-threatening , we call it as a Malignant tumor.

Cancer Development (credit)

Cancer is a group of disease which particularly involves the abnormal cellular proliferation/growth that can ultimately spread and threaten other body tissue. It is an abnormal behaviour or say an antisocial behaviour of your own body cell that typically starts when there is a various genetic abnormality accumulating in its DNA . There is special kind of gene specifically meant to prevent cancer called as "tumor suppressor gene" which stops the cells growing out of control and restricting its various activity. The cell growth also depends upon the switching on/off of the proto-oncogenes and oncogenes which can ultimately define cancer in other words. The proto-oncogenes just grows the cells in rapid sense when activated to Oncogenes . Cells together is called a tumor.

Proto-oncogenes and Oncogenes (credit)

DNA and genes are particularly too much fragile which can easily be susceptible it damage and mutations . The mutation in right place can harm and interfere with the genes in our body. When the tumor suppressor genes as described above is inactivated and even when oncogenes are activated , there is the condition that cells become antisocial by ignoring the body tissue growth and regulating mechanism and starts to proliferate and multiply uncontrollably. These result to tumor which significantly grows and mutates.

In the tumor gene, when there is the damage and change in the promoter region and regulatory gene, the tumor becomes vulnerable to mutation and starts deactivating DNA repair genes and mechanisms resulting to further problems and susceptibility. When the tumor becomes chronic or malignant, the surrounding tissue also gets affected around the whole body. So many DNA mutation can result to Cancer.

What causes mutation if you may ask !

The mutation occurs when there are various risk facts like smoking, drinking,poor diet or when a person is introduced to harmful cancer causing chemicals into body as "CARCINOGENS" . These generally affects the most of the genes inside the cell and change them or even mutate them .

Even the infection from virus are prone to mutation . The virus has the genetic information stored in it and when it brings it to the cell , it alters the cell genes and causes it to mutate. Many mutation needs to cause cancer and overally we have about 3 out of 1 causes cancer average in the prevailing society.

Cancer having cures ?

There is lots and lots of compound and treatment that can do the job. Cancer is just not a typical illness , its actually our own body malfunctioning . Its very difficult to pin-point single or a universal medicine as different person has different genes and different environmental influence and habits. That means, a lung cancer patient has a total different gene compared to other lung cancer patient. It's not like a tuberculosis or meningitis which has a common agent that caused. Doctors has not slow process in stopping the progress of the cancer by preventing its blood supply. A surgical removal is done of the mass and even the changing mutated gene if possible in our immune system to help in fight effectively against cancer. Due to the latest technology and medicine progress, there have been a huge decrease in the mortality rate of the cancer patients .

Molecule S63845 which blocks MCL-1 protein (credit)

A new compound has been discovered by the scientists that effectively inhibit the growth of the cancer cells . the experiment showed that it reduced to the quarter of all known cancer types. This compound only targets the cancer cells and doesn't affect any healthy cells . This compound is named as S63845 which block the essetial protein called MCL1. This protein helps many cancer cells to grow and when this lack, there is no growth of the cancer cells. This discovery has helps many researcher too in fighting the various blood cancer such as lymphoma and solid tumors such as lung and breast cancer.

As stated by one of the team .Guillaume Lessene from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute located in Australia

This MCL1 protein is a major protein in many cancer as this is pro-survival protein that allows the cancer cells to bunk the process of programmed cell death (apoptosis) that normally erases the cancer cells from the body. And study have shown that S63845 targets the cancer cells dependent on MC1 protein .

This arises in the new classification of anti-cancer drug called as BH3-mimetics as it targets a family of proteins that cancer cells rely on its growth.

So this is all about the Cancer. Hope to see more updates from you @himal .