London: A 16-year-old Indian-origin boy in the UK claims to have devised a way to turn the most deadly form of triple negative breast cancer into a kind which responds to drugs.
Around 7,500 women each year are diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, a type of disease which does not respond to today’s most effective drugs. According to researches, when cancer cells are ‘undifferentiated’ they get stuck in a dangerous primitive form, never turning into recognisable breast tissue, and spreading quickly, leading to high grade tumours.
Krtin Nithiyandam from Epsom, Surrey who had won the Google Science Fair for creating an Alzheimer’s test which can spot the disease 10 years before diagnoses last year, believes that he has found a way to coax the more deadly cells into their differentiated form by blocking a protein called ID4.
“I’ve been basically trying to work out a way to change difficult-to-treat cancers into something that responds well to treatment. Most cancers have receptors on their surface which bind to drugs like Tamoxifen but triple negative don’t have receptors so the drugs don’t work. The prognosis for women with undifferentiated cancer isn’t very good so the goal is to turn the cancer back to a state where it can be treated. The ID4 protein actually stops undifferentiated stem cell cancers from differentiating so you have to block ID4 to allow the cancer to differentiate. I have found a way to silence the genes that produce ID4 which turns cancer back into a less dangerous state,” said Krtin.
Krtin has so far been working on the therapies in his school lab and at home but he is hoping to gain interest from the scientific community to develop the work further.
He has also discovered that upping the activity of a tumour suppressor gene called PTEN allows chemotherapy to work more effectively, so the dual treatment could prove far more effective than traditional drugs. The therapy idea, help him shortlist for the final of The Big Bang Fair competition.
