Stanford molecular and cellular physiologist and structural biologist Chris Garcia, PhD, and his fellow scientists have tweaked together a set of molecular tools that work like braces of varying lengths and torque to fix things several orders of magnitude too small to see with the naked eye.
Like faulty cell-surface receptors, for instance, whose aberrant signaling can cause all kinds of medical problems, including cancer.
Cell-surface receptors transmit naturally occurring signals from outside cells to the insides of cells. Molecular messengers circulating in the blood stumble on receptors for which they're a good fit, bind to them, and accelerate or diminish particular internal activities of cells, allowing the body to adjust to the needs of the minute.
Things sometimes go wrong. One or another of the body's various circulating molecular messengers (for example, regulatory proteins called cytokines) may be too abundant or scarce. Alternatively, a genetic mutation may render a particular receptor type overly sluggish, or too efficient. One such mutation causes receptors for erythropoietin - a cytokine that stimulates production of certain blood-cell types - to be in constant overdrive, resulting in myeloproliferative disorders. Existing drugs for this condition sometimes overshoot, bringing the generation of needed blood-cell types to a screeching halt.
Garcia's team took advantage of the fact that many receptors - erythropoietin receptors, for example - don't perform solo, but instead work in pairs. In a proof-of-principle study in Cell, Garcia and his colleagues made brace-like molecular tools composed of stitched-together antibody fragments (known in the trade as diabodies). They then showed that these "two-headed beasts" can selectively grab on to two members of a mutated receptor pair and force the amped-up erythropoietin receptors into positions just far enough apart from, and at just the right angles to, one another to slow down their hyperactive signaling and act like normal ones.
That's a whole new kind of therapeutic approach. Call it "cellular orthopedics."
Previously: Souped-up super-version of IL-2 offers promise in cancer treatment and Minuscule DNA ring tricks tumors into revealing their presence
