'I've never seen anything like this': Scientists hijack cancer genes to turn tumors against themselves

Cancer can sometimes thwart drugs designed to treat it — but now, scientists have developed a way to turn tumor cells against their neighbors, forcing the cancer to cooperate with treatment. 

A cancer treatment's success hinges on its capacity to damage cancer cells enough to kill them or stop them from growing. However, some cancer cells can change their molecular makeup to either mitigate or cancel out the therapy's effect. 

Now, in a proof-of-concept study, scientists have unveiled a new way of overcoming this cancer drug resistance: hacking the evolution of cancer cells and tagging them with a target that makes them more vulnerable to therapies. The researchers published their findings Thursday (July 4) in the journal Nature BioTechnology.

"There's all this time and effort and energy and money and heartbreaks put into finding drugs that are going to be effective against the next version of the tumor," lead study author Scott Leighow, a bioengineer at Pennsylvania State University, told Live Science. But "no matter how good they are, they're not durable in the long term."

The new approach could combat existing anticancer drug resistance before it becomes insurmountable.

Cancer drug resistance can develop in many ways. For instance, cancer cells can molecularly inactivate a drug or flip internal switches to cheat their own deaths. To try and get around this, doctors can treat patients with combinations of drugs that use different attacks against the tumors. But the approach has limitations.

"The challenge with a lot of these advanced tumors is that we just don't have a lot of good targets to make drugs against," senior study author Justin Pritchard, a biomedical engineer at Pennsylvania State University, told Live Science. "There's not always a second drug that works as well [and] through a totally independent mechanism of action."