Israeli gene therapy ‘edits cancer code’
CAN A cure for cancer really be in sight? Ori Zelichov, a visionary Israeli biochemist, believes it could be and is convinced the answer lies in the power to modify mutating genes — cutting out the bad stuff causing disease and replacing corrected genes that will not cause any more trouble. “The tools we already have make it possible to edit genes in the same way you might edit code,” he says.
After qualifying as a doctor, Zelichov was involved in cancer research at Israel’s National Institute of Biotechnology. He was appalled by the lack of precision faced by medics treating cancer. “I saw doctors didn’t have accurate enough tools to differentiate between tumours and surrounding cells,” he says. So he founded Boomerang to explore a solution.
“I had the idea of using genetic editing tools to put colour into cancer cells to help differentiate them but then I thought: ‘Why don’t we kill those cells instead of just colouring them?’”
His system for targeting cancer cells looks for two different markers, unlike other systems, which use just one. This improves accuracy. The gene-editing involves introducing viruses into the cells to modify them. “We can direct an enzyme complex to where it is need- ed and then use it to cut out mutated genes and replace them with corrected ones, treating not just the disease which has already developed but the root of the disease to hopefully prevent it returning,” he says.
If the idea of invading bodies with a virus sounds scary, Zelichov points out that Boomerang’s system has been shown to be active only in cancer cells — whose destructive genes it actually causes to commit suicide — while levels of the complex were undetectable in healthy cells.
Best of all, Zelichov’s system is both cheap and highly accurate, he says, although Boomerang is trying to raise $1 million to do further tests and refine what may one day be seen as a groundbreaking tool in the battle to beat cancer. Meanwhile Boomerang’s system, based on research at Ben Gurion University, has won first place in a synthetic biology competition in Boston and attracted attention in China’s Global Innovation Awards.
Could it one day be considered a cure? “Theoretically yes, once an efficient system has been found to deliver the therapy,” says Zelichov. “But that’s not our own area of expertise, so we must hope that somewhere in the world someone is concentrating on that side of the problem as hard as we are focusing on what we know how to do.”
Instead of colouring cancer cells, let’s kill them’