MuTaTo^&copy—A Novel Concept for Curing Cancer

Abstract

One of the main reasons for developing cancer drug-resistance is the ability of cancer cells to adopt mutations that help them fight the treatments. Cancer cells are very mutagenic. This makes the population of cancer cells in any tumor, or any other cancer cells that come from a distinct origin (one parent cell) highly variable. In some cases, there are already drug-resistant cancer cells at the beginning of the treatment. In other cases, they emerge during the treatment. Treating cancer patients with drugs, or other treatments that at tack only one cancer-target would therefore be prone to bad prognosis. In addition, these kinds of treatments would also attack (to a lower degree) non-cancer cells that contain the same targets as the cancer cells. This would lead to ad verse effects. Combination therapies, or bispecific drugs could partly solve these problem s , but not completely. To address this and other problems, a novel concept for curing cancer, MuTaTo &copy , was developed. MuTaTo is a personalized medicine concept. The main principal of it is using multiple targeting peptides connected together with a toxin. The main advantage of MuTaTo is that it would lower the probability of the targeted cancer cells to develop drug-resistance due to mutations they possess, and at the same time would lower adverse effects due to avidity effect. Each cancer patient would receive a specific MuTaTo drug perfectly suited to his cancer, based on the expression profile of receptors on the outer membrane of his cancer cells. MuTaTo construct production is easy and rapid. Therefore, the production cost would not be as expensive as with other biological drugs, or other sophisticated cancer treatments. In this article several experiments were performed to show the efficacy of different MuTaTo constructs, and the sustainability of the principals of this concept. The results showed that multi-targeting was better than mono targeting, and that MuTaTo was efficient as a mono treatment in vitro , and in vivo .