Living in Shade

Here at Living in Shade, we scour all over to find all the best info on sun protection and skin cancer to share with you, our faithful readers. Today I found a very interesting article from The Daily Mail over in the United Kingdom. In the article “Sting That Kills Cancer: Tiny ‘Nanobee’ Particles Full of Venom Target Diseased Cells”, an exciting new development in the fight against cancer is discussed.

Scientists have discovered that they can use bee venom to fight cancerous cells, while leaving the uninfected tissue unharmed. These bees aren’t your normal bees. Their what they call “nanobees”, their microscopic versions of the bees we know. These nanobees are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. It sounds almost like something out of a science fiction novel However, they found in their studies that these bees were able to shrink both breast and skin cancer tumors.

(The bees)home in on the diseased cells before pumping out the melittin venom, delivering a deadly ’sting’. At their core are beads made from perfluorocarbon, an inert material used in artificial blood.

The nanobees are tiny enough to pass easily through blood and attach to cells but big enough to ferry drugs into the body.

Researcher Professor Samuel Wickline said: ‘They fly in, land on the surface of cells and deposit their cargo of melittin, which rapidly merges with the target.

‘We’ve shown the bee toxin gets taken into the cells where it pokes holes in their internal structures.’

The nanoparticle packaging stops the melittin doing any damage as it travels to the tumour as well as protecting it from being broken down by the body.

Other compounds are added to the package to guide it to exactly where it is needed.

This process has proven effective in tests on mice infected with cancer. With the skin cancer mice, tumors shrank by 75 percent according to The Journal of Clinical Investigation. As of now they’ve only tested it on breast and skin cancer, but they say the options are almost endless in just how many different cancers these method of treatment could eventually attack.

An amazing aspect of this already amazing treatment, is that there didn’t seem to be any major side effects. When compared with treatments such as chemotherapy, which cause people to lose their hair and just generally feel horrible, this is a tremendous breakthrough.

Researchers here in the United States have also been involved.

Dr Paul Schlesinger, another researcher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, said melittin was proving to be a formidable weapon.

‘It has been of interest to researchers because, in high enough concentration, it can destroy any cell it comes into contact with.

‘Cancer cells can develop resistance to many agents that alter gene function or target a cell’s DNA.

‘But it’s hard for cells to find a way around the mechanism that melittin uses to kill.

‘Nanobees are an effective way to package the useful, but potentially deadly, melittin so that it neither harms normal cells nor gets degraded before it reaches its target.’

Both groups of scientists agree that melittin can be “easily and cheaply produced”. It seems to be an almost too good to be true treatment for these deadly diseases.

The unfortunate part is that this treatment option is several years away from being marketed. Further testing on animals must be done first, which will then progresses to tests on humans, before its available to the general public. It is a potential bright spot for the future though, and shows just how hard scientists are working on our behalf towards the dream of one day ending deaths from cancer.

Its also interesting to note the vital role that animal testing has played in this research. Animal testing gets a whole lot of negative press, and I am totally against it when its used for things such as perfume and makeup. This however, shows that when done in the right way, it can be a play a vital role in things that are really important for our society.