Glioblastoma is the deadliest form of brain cancer due to its aggressive growth rate. Most patients don’t survive for more than a year after diagnosis, and the disease quickly develops resistance to existing treatments. Scientists have been racing to find ways to treat this malignancy and prolong patient survival.
Now, a team of researchers in South Korea have found a novel protein that acts as the switch regulating glioblastoma’s growth. The researchers also identified a compound that can turn off this switch, effectively slowing down the cancer’s growth and reducing the size of tumors.
Doctor Han Tae-su, who led the study team, explains that their work uncovered how the protein, NMUR2, induces glioblastoma tumors to proliferate.
In their work, the team obtained brain tissue from patients with glioblastoma. They analyzed these samples and observed that cancer patients tended to have high levels of NMUR2 expression. Brain tissues that were healthy didn’t express this protein to the same degree. They also observed that the more this protein was expressed, the more malignant the brain cancer was.
To verify these observations, the study team took cancer cells and artificially ramped up the NMUR2 protein. The growth of the cancer cells accelerated, and the rate at which the cancer cells spread to surrounding tissues also ramped up.
The researchers then suppressed the expression of NMUR2 in cancer cells and observed that cell multiplication slowed down, showing that this protein played a direct role in the growth of glioblastoma cancer cells.
Armed with these findings, the team embarked on the quest for a compound that could turn off this switch that enables cancer cells to grow and multiply. They screened nearly 6,500 compounds and found one, NNC 05-2090, that bound to NMUR2 and blocked the transduction of this protein’s signal.
The compound was tested on mouse models and cancer tissues in the lab, and the result in both cases was that the proliferation of cancer cells was inhibited. When tested in combination with temozolomide, a cancer drug currently used to fight GBM, the therapeutic impact was far greater than the benefit of using each of those compounds on its own.
This shows that NNC 05-2090 could help in increasing the efficacy of existing brain cancer medications, especially among patients who stop responding to treatment once their cancers become resistant to the treatment being administered.
More work needs to be done to test how well this compound can penetrate the blood-brain barrier in order to reach the glioblastoma tumors, and how best the drug can be delivered to the tumor microenvironment. If safety and drug stability attributes are established in clinical trials, NNC 05-2090 could usher in a new way to wage a more effective fight against brain cancer.
Other research teams at firms like CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are also undertaking their own drug development programs aimed at bringing to market effective treatments for glioblastoma and other brain cancers. The success of such R&D programs could change the prognosis of patients diagnosed with these malignancies.
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