Colorectal cancer (CRC), the second most diagnosed cancer in Malta, is highly curable through various treatment strategies, if found at an early stage. However, one of the obstacles typically encountered throughout the course of treatment with chemotherapy is the development of drug resistance.
A tumour can be intrinsically drug-resistant, meaning resistant from the start of therapy, or acquires resistance throughout the course of treatment. Cancer cells can develop resistance through various mechanisms.
One of the ways by which cancer cells escape the toxic effects of the chemotherapy drugs is by altering proteins essential for cell survival. Similar to how one can modify a car to improve its performance, a cancer cell can chemically modify proteins within it to work differently, based on the conditions it experiences.
Cancer cells can develop resistance through various mechanisms
One such chemical modification involves the addition of methyl groups, through a process known as protein methylation. It is important to identify and validate molecules involved in such chemoresistance mechanisms in order to improve treatment strategies.
Such molecules, called biomarkers, can be followed throughout the course of treatment, and indicate the effectiveness of the therapy. This will help doctors decide whether to change treatment regimen and thus improve patients’ overall outcome.
Specific methylations can be used as diagnostic biomarkers when combined into a test panel covering proteins involved in different cell processes.
This research is being led by Byron Baron and is supported by surgeons at Mater Dei Hospital and by custom software developed by Incredible Web Ltd.
Project Kme-CRC is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Technology Development Programme.
As part of a Master’s degree project on chemoresistance in CRC, Isaac Micallef established that protein methylation plays a role in the development of resistance to the chemotherapeutic drugs Doxorubicin and 5-Fluorouracil. Such analysis provided new knowledge on what takes place in CRC chemoresistance and has placed us a step closer to identifying potential biomarkers which could be used in the clinical setting.
This research was partially funded by the Endeavour Scholarship Scheme (Malta). The project is part-financed by the European Social Fund ‒ Operational Programme II ‒ European Structural and Investment Funds 2014-2020 ‘Investing in human capital to create more opportunities and promote the well-being of society’.
Sound Bites
• Research has revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study has now shown that both skills rely on the same neurological resources, which are located in the same brain region. Furthermore, motor training using a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences and – vice-versa – syntactic training improves our proficiency in using tools.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211111154244.htm
• Researchers discovered precisely how spiders build webs by using night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of all eight legs as spiders worked in the dark. Their creation of a web-building playbook or algorithm brings new understanding of how creatures with brains a fraction of the size of a human’s are able to create structures of such elegance, complexity and geometric precision.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211101105356.htm
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DID YOU KNOW?
• If you want to use a photo of the Eiffel Tower for commercial purposes, you need permission if it was taken at night but not if it was taken during the day. The copyright on the tower and its image has expired, but the copyright on the tower illumination installed in 1989 has not.
• The words ‘war’ and ‘worse’ come from the same Germanic word meaning ‘to confuse or mix up’.
• Among the Powhatan people, mothers used to refuse their sons breakfast until they’d passed a morning archery test by hitting something thrown in the air.
• Alice Lee was a statistician who debunked the claim that men must be more intelligent than women because of bigger skulls. In 1898, she measured the skulls of 35 members of the Anatomical Society and found that the smallest heads belonged to the most renowned scientists.
For more trivia, see: www.um.edu.mt/think.