Professor Yasuyuki Fujita of Hokkaido University and others have succeeded in developing a screening evaluation system to investigate the effect of a substance as a cancer preventive drug.It is useful for investigating drugs that enhance the ability of cells to eliminate other cell abnormalities that they originally have.
With one in three Japanese dying from cancer, improving the therapeutic effect of cancer is one of the most important research issues.On the other hand, it is also desirable to develop preventive treatment methods that do not cause cancer in the first place.However, at present, there are no scientifically recognized cancer preventive drugs.Professor Fujita and his colleagues wondered if it would be possible to prevent this by strengthening the ability of cells to eliminate mutated cells that are the seeds of cancer.
To find such a drug, it is effective to actually administer many compounds to cells and check whether they can activate the function of cells.To that end, we have developed a method for culturing cells taken from mammals and investigating how their ability to remove tumors changes.Using this, we succeeded in discovering a compound that has the effect of promoting the elimination of mutant cells.There are still many hurdles to getting approval as a drug, but there is no doubt that this method will significantly advance preventive drug development.
We hope to continue to develop this method in the near future to discover cancer preventive drugs.If it can be done easily and at low cost, many researchers will be able to confirm the effects of various compounds, and the development of cancer preventive drugs will be accelerated.
