Three ways to selectively kill cancer cells; plus Aevis and more

Three teams published new methods this week that exploit abnormal biology in cancer cells to selectively kill the cells while sparing non-cancerous cells. 

A group led by Robert Bradley at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Omar Abdel-Wahab at  Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center revealed in Nature Biotechnology a method that takes advantage of cancer cells’ abnormal splicing activity to selectively kill them. The group engineered synthetic introns containing herpes simplex virus–thymidine kinase constructs and showed that cancer cells bearing SF3B1 mutations spliced the constructs into their endogenous mRNA, yielding HSV-TK protein expression. Wild-type cells, by contrast, did not splice the intron into their constructs and did not express HSV-TK after treatment. As HSV-TK is the target of the antiviral ganciclovir, expression of HSV-TK by the SF3B1-mutant cancer cells enabled their ganciclovir-mediated killing. ...