The Universitat Jaume I (UJI) and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) have patented new compounds with potent anti-carcinogenic activity in tumour cells that have a very low toxicity in healthy cells, which can reduce the side effects dramatically during chemotherapy.

The designed compounds have particularly high therapeutic effects on tumour cells of breast and colon and can be the basis for the development of oncological drugs of low toxicity and high selectivity since they act on the diseased cells without affecting healthy cells. As the researcher and professor at the UJI, Miguel Carda Usó says: «At first, antitumor treatments were very unspecific and caused side effects in other parts of the body not affected by the tumour. Cancer was fought but at the cost of provoking other pathologies associated with non-specific treatment. Nowadays are being sought more specific treatments for each type of cancer, and these new compounds could be applied to personalised therapies that reduce the side effects of cancer treatments.»

This is an encouraging finding, which is part of the new therapeutic strategies in oncology addressed to boycott the mechanisms used by tumour cells for their uncontrolled proliferation. As Eva Falomir, the professor at the UJI who has conducted the biological tests, says: «these compounds act against telomeres, structures of chromosomes that are shortened with each cell division. When shortening is very lengthy, the cell ages and dies. This is a natural process, but in cancerous cells the shortening does not occur because an enzyme, telomerase, prevents the shortening of telomeres, that makes tumour cells not to age and become immortal, that is why it is very difficult to fight them». The innovation of the new compounds is related to their ability to decrease the amount of active telomerase in tumour cells so that the immortality of the cancer cells disappears.

Besides demonstrating a particularly high efficiency to kill cancer cells and low toxicity on healthy cells, the new compounds may also inhibit the expression of oncogenes (cancer predisposing genes) blocking the generation of telomerase and other related proteins with tumour activity.

The design of the new compounds and the biological tests on tumour cell lines have been in charge of the Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine of the CSIC and the Group of Organic Synthesis of the UJI.

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