US researchers have discovered a substance that can destroy cancer cells, advancing treatment options for the deadly disease that kills millions of people worldwide.
The element actinium was first discovered by French scientist André-Louis Debierne in 1899 and is ranked 89th on the periodic table.
Now, after 125 years of its existence, there’s a strong possibility that it could lead to improvements in cancer treatments, as the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found.
Even after 125 years, actinium remains a mysterious element in science, because to this day it is found in extremely small quantities, and working with it requires special facilities, not an ordinary radioactive laboratory.
The team of scientists attempted to grow it, and while the elements may behave similarly to their lighter-weight counterparts, actinium behaved differently from its counterpart lanthanum.
From nuclear energy to medicine, these elements can serve the purpose admirably, as both are radioactive and earthy minerals, it is not actinium itself that protects us, it is an isotope – a specific atomic species of any element – called actinium 225, which has shown promising results in a method called targeted alpha therapy (TAT).
The TAT technology delivers radioactive elements to the cancer site via biological delivery mechanisms such as peptides or antibodies.
When actinium disintegrates, it emits energetic particles that travel short distances, killing local cancer cells while sparing distant healthy tissue.
“If we can engineer a protein to bind actinium with high affinity, and then attach it to an antibody or act as a targeting protein, that would really open up new ways to develop radiopharmaceuticals,” said Rebecca Abergel, associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California-Berkeley.
The researchers used a revolutionary method to create crystals from just 5 micrograms of pure actinium, which is about one-tenth the weight of a grain of salt and invisible to the naked eye.
They initially refined actinium using a complex filtration method, which removed other elements and chemical contaminants.
They then attached the actinium to a metal-trapping molecule, called a ligand, and placed this bundle inside a protein identified and purified by Roland Strong’s team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, resulting in a “macromolecular scaffold.”
The crystals, grown for a week inside the Heavy Element Research Laboratory, were then cryofrozen in liquid nitrogen and irradiated with X-rays at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source.
X-rays revealed the compound’s three-dimensional structure and showed how this mysterious element interacts with other nearby atoms.
This study used the longest-lived isotope of actinium, actinium 227, although actinium 225 is preferred for the targeted alpha method (as it has also been used for prostate cancer and has shown positive results).
The last word has not yet been said, but that opening prose is the sweet beginning of a future scientific opera that will usher in a new era of cancer treatment, researchers said.
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