This paper suggests that the Brazilian wasp venom targets cancer cells and makes holes in the membrane large enough for the important cell reproducing things, like RNA, to spill out making the cancerous cell unable to reproduce and otherwise worthless until it gets disposed of regularly. It also apparently leaves normal cells alone (or has limited/no effect on them).
Edit: It does this in a petri dish, not a living body.
No. MPA-1 is an antimicrobial peptide, or short protein. These short proteins are very susceptible to other proteins in serum (your blood), which break them up quickly. Additionally, mass production of small peptides is very expensive, and even the results listed would never make it into a serious FDA trial; the selectivity ratio between healthy cells and cancer cells is still too low.
However, the insights into how and why this peptide acts the way it does are important to creating future therapeutic strategies.
Very cool. Once you validate a target, people can start working on finding things that will have the same affect on that target, but are actually useful in vivo. Medicine has came a long way from the old days of just throwing random molecules at a problem until you find one that works.
Ish. While this is another piece of evidence in the puzzle, we are a long way off from having a mechanistic understanding of these interactions.
Our current understanding of Biology is that the primary sequence of amino acids in a protein determine its structure, which then determines what that protein does. This is why finding all of those cool protein crystal structures is such a big deal. The issue is that these interactions are dynamic, and a protein can change its fold- what it looks like- based on pH, ions nearby, binding to other proteins, or being in a hydrophobic environment, such as the inner core of cell membranes.
We have no comprehensive understanding of how these interactions work, and thus a very shakey understanding of how to design or optimize structures like the ones we know work in a test tube to ones we know will work in a human. It's a long game with lots of players, but every little bit helps!
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u/EvoEpitaph Sep 01 '15 edited Sep 02 '15
This paper suggests that the Brazilian wasp venom targets cancer cells and makes holes in the membrane large enough for the important cell reproducing things, like RNA, to spill out making the cancerous cell unable to reproduce and otherwise worthless until it gets disposed of regularly. It also apparently leaves normal cells alone (or has limited/no effect on them).
Edit: It does this in a petri dish, not a living body.