A newly released study by scientists, mostly from Penn State University, outlines their technique of penetrating cancer cells and editing them to make them more vulnerable to cancer therapies.
The proof-of-concept study was published July 4 in Nature Biotechnology.
The scientists “devised an approach to edit cancer cells, delivering two new ‘switches’ into them. The first switch enables modified cells to outgrow the rest of the cancer cell population. Then, the second switch allows these cells to unleash a toxic drug onto the remaining tumor,” Kristel Tiandra wrote in LiveScience.
Tiandra explained that the scientists inserted two “suicide genes” into non-small cell lung cancer cells (NSCLC); one gene, aided by the cancer drug erlotinib — which usually stops a protein called EGFR from being activated — allowed the cancer cells to become resistant to erlotinib, thus…
