The advantage of this approach is that it holds out the possibility of treatment that would be much less harmful than regular chemotherapy, which involves large doses of toxic drugs that inevitably destroy normal cells as well as cancer cells.
Eitan Yefenof, the Bertha and Max Densen Professor of General and Tumor Immunology, and his associates at the Lautenberg Center have developed a technique of linking a toxic molecule with an antibody directed against specific cancer cell receptors. By introducing this material into the blood stream it is possible to induce the cancer cell to internalize the entire complex (receptor-antibody-toxin). Once this occurs, the toxin kills or inactivates the cancer cell, thus preventing it from replicating. The overall result is that the cancer - even if it may not be totally destroyed - stops growing and becomes dormant. It is known that people with dormant cancer cells can lead healthy lives for prolonged periods of time.
The Hebrew University investigators have shown that their method is feasible by introducing a prostate cell carcinoma of human origin adapted to grow in a special strain of immunologically deficient mice (mice which lack an immune system and thus cannot reject the human cells).
When treated with the human antibody-toxin complex, the cancer cells introduced into the mice became dormant, and the mice remained healthy for as long as the treatment continued.
Cancer of the prostate is one of the major cancers of man. Thus, the work conducted by the Lautenberg Center researchers, if shown to be effective in human clinical tests, could be of great practical importance in this and other types of cancer.
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