PREVIOUSLY FAILED CANCER DRUG REPURPOSED TO ACT AS ‘FLAG’ FOR CANCER-SEEKING NUCLEAR MISSILE

Research into a cancer treatment over 10 years in the making has born remarkable fruit with the juicy potential to greatly improve existing radiation therapy.Throughout the 21st century, GNN has reported on how cancer research has broadened, expanded, become more precise and more forgiving on non-cancerous cells, and even shown how cancer may be beaten without ever needing to be fought.From the days of chemo and radiation therapy that often left patients exhausted, hairless, and unable to retain weight, there are now many more options that are increasing survival rates while diminishing side effects.In 2013, UC San Francisco researcher Kevan Shokat was looking to end a 30-year wait for a method to target the biggest cellular driver of tumor growth, known as KRAS. This protein, when mutated, causes unlimited cell proliferation, allowing small tumors to balloon, and come raging back if shrunk.Shokat succeeded by developing a drug that targeted only the mutated version of KRAS, present in nearly one-third of all cancers, but which is even more prevalent in lung, pancreatic, and colon cancer tumors.However, his discovery of how to target KRAS never matured into a surefire way of destroying it—future experiments showed how tumors that lost KRAS proteins would come back again.