A significant breakthrough in cancer treatment recently came from biomedical engineering professor Yosi Shamay and a group of researchers at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The team's approach, which it calls meta-synergy, uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to run simulations that pair novel drug combinations to treat cancer.
The AI platform can run through a massive number of combinations and estimate the drugs' ability to aid with various cancers. Through this process the faculty members discovered multiple combinations that offer higher efficacy than the drugs taken alone, underscoring the potential for combinations as novel treatments.
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The Power Of Combinations
Combination treatment for cancer therapy is not new. It's an established practice that uses different drugs together to attack tumors. Researchers at Technion take combination therapy a step further. They find drugs that work together on the biological level but also can combine chemically to create nanoparticles that target cancer cells with precision. The blending of these two elements prompted the team to coin the meta-synergy term to reflect the possibility of the treatments outperforming traditional combination therapies.
The model found an effective pairing for head-and-neck cancer using bortezomib and cabozantinib, drugs approved for blood and liver and kidney and thyroid cancers, respectively, and now are an effective combination for head-and-neck cancers.
The resulting nano-medicines exhibit a higher ability to target cancer cells and demonstrate success in combating tumors. They are also less toxic to patients and induce fewer adverse side effects, making them a promising avenue for cancer treatment for improved patient outcomes and experience.
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AI As A Drug Matchmaker
The AI system the team engineered employs text mining to aggregate information about biological synergy from various published articles. This enables it to build a comprehensive database that is the basis for the predictive algorithms that identify drug pairs that are more capable of forming nanoparticle pairs. This AI model acts as a kind of matchmaker and can perform these calculations at scale that would not be possible with traditional processes and trials.
This online tool has suggested 1,985 drug combinations for synergistic nano-medicines, targeting 70 types of cancer. The potential of this AI-driven matchmaking system lies in its ability to usher in a new era of precision medicine by identifying the most promising drug pairs for specific cancer types, bringing hope for patients and a new set of tools for healthcare providers.
Shamay explains the complexity of the endeavor, stating, "The development of meta-synergy on the nano-metric level is a very complex challenge." He emphasized that achieving this requires introducing at least two drugs simultaneously into the same delivery system so they can combine and reach the intended cancer site effectively.
Starpax Biopharma is a startup that's also taking a new approach to cancer treatments. It uses a multidiscipline approach of combining microbiology, biochemistry, electromagnetism and AI to create the company's proprietary Magnetodrones that enhance drug delivery in tumors.
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