Half of cancer patients receive radiation, a treatment that kills tumor cells but can have the unfortunate side effect of damaging bone. This reduced bone density increases the risk of fractures, and there’s no good way to prevent it.
A new study finds that disrupting a certain molecular signaling pathway inside the bone can prevent this loss. But this signaling pathway has many important roles in the body beyond bone maintenance, so the key is to target the bone and the bone only. To do so, researchers developed a drug-delivery nanocapsule that binds to bone minerals, preventing side effects from the treatment.
The nanocarrier-delivered drug has only been tested in mice and is not yet near the point of human trials. However, the drug itself is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat some types of tumors, says study senior author Colleen Wu, a cell and molecular biologist at the Duke Univ. School of Medicine.
“The key thing we’re really interested in,” Wu says, “is what are the cellular and molecular mechanisms that are driving this?”
The bone is an intriguing environment, Wu says, because it is a low-oxygen environment. In hypoxic tissues in the body, a class of transcription factors called hypoxia-inducible factors (HIFs) are important for cellular function....
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