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With virtual reality, you choose the molecule to beat cancer

From Corriere della Sera on March 3:

Computer simulations can help to choose the most effective anticancer drugs for individual patients

MILAN - cancer treatment is better with virtual reality. Easy to say, harder to understand, but is explained by the researchers of the Institute of Cancer in Milan with a news item appeared on a famous magazine, Nature Review in Clinical Oncology, which demonstrates how computer simulations can help to choose the most effective anticancer drugs for individual patients. Starting point: cancer cells have on their surface molecules (receptors), which are the target of new anticancer molecules. The latter, by binding to the receptor, blocking tumor growth. But things do not always work well. The tumor tries to 'resist' to treatment in a kind of evolutionary adaptation, changing the shape of its receptors: At this point the drug becomes ineffective. So it is essential to look for others.

receptor in 3D - Now, thanks to computer modeling, it is possible to reconstruct not only the receptor of the tumor in three dimensions, but also the drug, and assess when the two fit together perfectly like a puzzle (in this case the drug is effective) or when no longer fit (and that means the treatment has stopped working). "Our study concerns a particular type of tumor, the Gist - explains Marco Pierotti, scientific director of the cancer - which develops on the walls of the digestive system by connective tissue cells and is characterized by two receptors, called Kit and PDGFR-A. On these two imatinib is active. We have reconstructed in 3D computer, or the two receptors that the drug, studying their interactions. " Answers computer (we used the network of the University of Trieste) were then verified in clinical practice: When the computer reports, models of virtual ineffectiveness of the drug on the patient it stops working.

NEW MOLECULE - "The experiment - continued Pierotti - he suggested three things. In a case of increasing the dose of medication and this worked. In another, became "resistant" to imatinib, we tested a new molecule that has been effective, the computer first, then the patient. The last suggestion concerns the search for the future. " The idea, in fact, is to play at the computer, all possible modifications of receptors of a tumor, even those not yet appeared in nature, and to study, always with virtual reality, the interactions of the receptors 'changed' with a number of new drugs, to evaluate their effectiveness. It is a research project that involves the Nerviano Medical Sciences. The center of Lombard will offer his "library" of more than 65 000 molecules, all potential anticancer drugs, and the computer will monitor those assets. It can thus be assumed to create anti-cancer cocktail capable of fighting all the mutations of the tumor, even those that are not yet known.

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