Wasp Venom Selectively Assassinates Cancer Cells

Many wasp species have chemicals in their venom that kill bacteria. In the last few years, researchers
have found that some of these chemicals also kill cancer cells, though exactly how they work has
remained a mystery.

Now a new study has described exactly how one of these chemicals works its cancer-fighting magic: by
tearing holes in the cancer cells outer layer.

Marked for Destruction

The venom of the Brazilian wasp Polybia paulista contains a molecule called MP1. Its been previously
found that MP1 can inhibit the growth of prostate and bladder cancer cells, as well as multi-drug-
resistant leukemia, but it doesnt harm healthy cells.

But the question was how. Researchers suspected that the answer lay in the cells membranes. Thats
because the cancer cells that MP1 targets have two fatty molecules, or lipids, in their external membrane
that normal cells dont have.

These lipids phosphatidylserine (PS) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) now seem to be the
signposts that mark a cancer cell for destruction.

Two-Pronged Attack

To test how MP1 assassinated cancer cells, researchers Joo Ruggiero Neto and Paul Beales created cell
membranes in the lab with PS, PE, or both on their surface. Then they exposed the membranes to MP1.

All the membranes were affected by the treatment, but it turned out that having both PS and PE was the
secret combination that made cancer cells vulnerable to MP1. PS allows MP1 to bind to the cell, while PE
lets it tear big holes in the cell membrane.

So MP1s destruction of a cancer cell, researchers say, has two stages. First, MP1 bonds to the outer
surface of the cell, and then it opens holes or pores in the membrane big enough to let the cells contents
leak out. PS is crucial for the first part: seven times more MP1 molecules bound to membranes with PS
in their outer layer. And PE is crucial for the second: Once the MP1 molecules worked their way into the
membrane, they opened pores twenty to thirty times larger than in membranes without PE.

Formed in only seconds, these large pores are big enough to allow critical molecules such as RNA and
proteins to easily escape cells, said Neto in a press release. When that happens, the cell dies.

Future Chemotherapy

The results suggest that MP1 might be a good candidate for a future cancer treatment. If it works, it
would be the first cancer drug on the market which targets the cells lipid membranes. Neto, Beales, and
their colleagues say it could be especially useful as part of a combination of drugs, each of which targets
a different part of the cancer cell.

Of course, it will be a while before MP1 is ready to fight cancer in humans. First, researchers need to
understand more about how it works, and they need to be sure it will be safe for patients.

The results are encouraging so far, however. Antimicrobial peptides like MP1 usually dont differentiate
between cancer cells and healthy cells well enough to be considered as treatments, but in the lab, MP1
killed cancer cells and bacteria without harming normal cells from rats.

As it has been shown to be selective to cancer cells and non-toxic to normal cells in the lab, this peptide
has the potential to be safe, but further work would be required to prove that, said Beales in a press
release.
 Human Eye's Blind Spot Can Shrink with Training

The blind spot of the human eye can be shrunk with certain eye-training exercises, thus
improving a person's vision slightly, a small new study suggests.

In the study of 10 people, researchers found that the blind spot the tiny region of a person's
visual field that matches up with the area in the eye that has no receptors for light, and hence
cannot detect any image can shrink 10 percent, with special training.

That amount of change "is quite an improvement, but people wouldn't notice, as we are typically
unaware of our blind spots," said study author Paul Miller, of the University of Queensland in
Australia. Normally, the brain pulls in visual information from the regions surrounding the
blind spot, compensating for it, so people don't usually perceive it.

"The real significance is that our data shows that regions of blindness can be shrunk by training,
and this may benefit people who suffer from pathological blindness," Miller told Live Science.

The blind spot of the eye exists because there are no light receptors in a small region of the
retina. In this spot, the optic nerve, which extends toward the eye from deep within the brain,
reaches the back of the eye, at the retina's surface. The nerve prevents the light receptors that
line the rest of the retina from being in that spot. [Eye Tricks: Gallery of Visual Illusions]

In the study, the researchers trained 10 people for 20 days on what researchers call a "direction-
discrimination" task. During the task, the investigators used an image of a ring, centered in the
blind spot of one of the person's eyes. Waves of dark and light bands moved through the ring,
and the participants were asked what direction the waves were moving. In another task, they
were asked what color the ring was.

But the size of the ring was manipulated sometimes, it was made small enough that it fell
completely within a person's blind spot, while other times, it was larger, falling within
the person's field of vision. When the training began, the exercises were designed so that the
people in the study were able to correctly judge the direction of the wave's movement only about
70 percent of the time.

Eventually, the people's eyes were better able to detect the image in their blind spot. At the end
of the study, the participants' ability to correctly judge both the direction of the waves and the
color of the ring improved.

It does not seem that the improvement was simply due to practicing the task, because the results
of doing the training with one eye did not result in any shrinking of the blind spot in the other
eye, the researchers said.

Instead, the results suggest that the training increased the sensitivity of certain receptors that
overlap or are adjacent to the blind spot, they said. The eye therefore becomes more sensitive to
the weak signals that come from near or within the site of blindness.

The study shows that it may be possible to use similar training routines to help people with age-
related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries,
Miller said. Macular degeneration is the breakdown of the central part of the retina, which is
called the macula.

Such training could also be used together with other technologies currently being developed,
such as the bionic eye or retinal stem cell therapy, to help people to recover their vision, the
researchers said.