Specific, targeted Ig-coated cancer treatment

The problem with cancer cells are that they are embedded in healthy tissue. The goal is to target only the cancerous cells and leave the healthy tissue intact. The key is that the cancerous cells are different from the healthy surrounding, but we don’t know how they are different.

The project I suggest is to develop a specialized system that identifies the distinguishing factors of a specific cancer from its surrounding. This falls under the new emerging field of personalized medicine. It involves the combination of the following things: biopsy, generation of Ig (immunoglobulins) with GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein), Ig-coated drug delivery system.

Let’s start with the easiest part. The system requires a biopsy from the target cancer to be eliminated. However, the system also requires biopsy from the surrounding healthy tissue. If you also get to have other biopsies of other healthy tissues of the person, even better.

The next stage is tricky, but already doable today. Ig are small molecules from our immune system. They can attach to different targets on cells, called antigens. There are practically an infinite variety of Ig, since they are composed from a combination of 15-22 amino-acids. This is how the immune system “learns” to detect foreign and harmful things.

I propose to have a “bank” of Ig-GFP, where the latter is a protein that emits green fluorescent light. The goal is to immerse the cancerous cell with each of these tagged Ig-GFP and get a “reading” of how much binding there has been. By running a bank of these Ig-GFP, one can get an “Ig-fingerprint” of that specific cell.

However, this is not enough. The point is to also immerse the surrounding healthy tissue sample with the same bank, with the goal of finding the best distinguishing combination of Ig that maximizes the binding to the cancerous cells and minimizes the binding to the healthy tissue. If you really want to go crazy, you can make it an adaptive optimization process by which one generates an adaptation mechanism on the Ig binding site to maximize specificity.

Once we found the best combination that binds specifically only to the cancerous cell, one needs to use this information to kill it in the body. There are already several mechanisms of targeted drug delivery. One of them is through micelles, which are large round membranes that contain the drug. If one can thus coat these delivery systems with the Ig-combination we found, these will only attach to the cancerous cells, and not to the surrounding healthy tissue. Combining binding with drug-release completes the job.

This may sound like a very hard thing to do, but the benefits are enormous. Targeted, minimal side-effects cancer therapy that can work on almost any type of cancer