Experts from the Institute of Biotechnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Carolina University in Prague and the Smart Brain company are collaborating on a promising project. The team has already requested the registration of a patent in the European Union and the United States of its substance mitoDFO, which alters the functioning of cancer cells with a new method so that it cannot develop, the director of the responsible laboratory, Jaroslav Truksa.
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“This substance reaches the mitochondria and ends its normal functioning. In the mitochondria it works something like a power plant of cells that produces energy and for this it needs iron. Our substance enters the mitochondria, blocks iron and does not allow it to function as it normally does ”.
Iron is essential for tumors to grow, Truksa continues.
“Iron has an important role. All cells that need to divide, that is, bend their DNA, their genetic information, need all their elements to grow, such as the membrane, in order to divide. For these processes they need iron and cancer cells even more because they divide much faster and more often ”.
This new deferoxamine takes advantage of the peculiarities of the metabolism of the mitochondria of cancer cells. One of the qualities of the substance that its creators highlight the most is that it only attacks harmful cells and respects healthy cells, something that they have already been able to verify in their experiments with mice.
In this phase of experimentation they have already tested its effects on various types of cancer, as Jaroslav Truksa explained to Czech Television.
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“With breast cancer with a poor prognosis, in a mouse model with a functional immune system we have shown that our substance significantly slows its growth, the tumor does not grow as fast, and in some animals it has even disappeared. But what we have also verified is that the expansion of cancer cells through the body was greatly slowed down, so metastasis was notoriously retained. “
In their experiments they have discovered, for example, that with mice with a deficient immune system the effects of its substance on pancreatic cancer were less, so they believe that this discovery does not act by itself, but aided by the immune system itself .
In any case, from the application of mitoDFO until its effects begin to be noticed in the tests, it takes only between 7 and 10 days, says the scientist.
Truksa explains that soon they should advance to an experimentation phase with other animals, such as pigs or dogs, especially, before being able to carry out clinical tests in people. A longer process, of course, than everyone would like, since it calculates between five and ten years when they can finally refer to its substance as a medicine suitable for curing the sick.
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