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Bee venom can kill breast cancer cells
The substance that makes bee stings so painful could in the future perhaps save the lives of breast cancer patients, especially its particularly aggressive types, for which there are currently not many treatment options available.
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Sunday, 06 September 2020, 05:00
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In the video: a broadcast of one of 9 to encourage early detection of breast cancer
Encountering the sharp tip of a bee sting is a dubious experience that anyone who has experienced it will certainly not be left with a sweet memory, but this means of self-defense of the bees may be of great value to the medical world.
A new study finds that a molecule that is inside the venom can stop the growth of particularly nasty cancer cells.
The study focused on certain types of breast cancer, including TNBC (triple-negative breast cancer), which is considered a very aggressive type of breast cancer, and its treatment options are quite limited.
This cancer accounts for about 15 percent of all breast cancer cases, and in many of its cases doctors have seen that these cancer cells produce a greater amount of the EGFR molecule.
Previous attempts to develop therapies that focus on this molecule have yielded pottery because they have also damaged healthy cells.
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Honey bee venom has already proven its therapeutic potential in other medical fields, such as eczema treatment, and researchers have long known that it also has properties that can inhibit the development of tumors.
However, so far it has not been clear how this mechanism works at the molecular level, and the present study is a significant advance on the path to answer.
A honey bee flying next to a flower (Photo: Reuven Castro)
Bees use melitin - a molecule that makes up half of their venom composition (and also what makes it so painful) - to fight themselves against pathogens that threaten them.
The bees produce this peptide not only in their venom but also in other tissues, where it is produced in response to infections.
In the study, published in the scientific journal Nature Precision Oncology, the researchers exposed under laboratory conditions breast cancer cells and healthy cells to the venom of honey bees from Ireland, England and Australia, as well as to the venom of bumble bees from England.
They found that the venom of the bumblebee (which does not contain melitin, but has other substances with the potential to destroy cells) has a negligible effect on breast cancer cells.
In contrast, the venom of honey bees from all the geographical locations where it was collected, actually did affect the tumor cells.
Aggressive cancer cells produce high amounts of molecules that melittin knows how to localize on.
Illustration of breast cancer cells (shutterstock)
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"The venom was very powerful. We discovered that it could completely destroy cancer cell membranes in just 60 minutes," said Chiara Duffy, a medical researcher at the Harry Perkins Research Institute.
When the researchers blocked the action of melitin with the help of an antibody, the cancer cells exposed to the venom were able to survive - proving that melitin is indeed the substance responsible for the positive results in the first part of the study.
A very significant part of the experiment is the discovery that melitin is not harmful to healthy cells, but specifically attacks cells that produce large amounts of EGFR and HER2 (another molecule that is overproduced by certain types of breast cancer).
Melitin has even been able to disrupt the ability of cancer cells to replicate themselves.
Is a synthetic version of the venom equally effective?
The research team did not stop there, and even went a step further by developing a synthetic version of Melitin, to test whether its performance compares to the original version.
"We found that the synthetic product restored most of the anti-cancer effects seen in the original bee venom," said researcher Duffy.
Killing cancer cells under laboratory conditions is one thing, doing it inside the body is more complicated.
Hand holding Petri dish (Photo: Imagebank GettyImages)
Next, Duffy and her team examined how combining melitin with chemotherapy drugs affects laboratory mice, and saw that this experimental treatment was able to reduce the production of a molecule used by cancer cells to slip under the radar of the immune system.
"We have discovered that melitin can be used in conjunction with smaller molecules present in certain chemotherapeutic drugs to treat the most aggressive types of breast cancer. The combination of melitin and a drug called docetaxel has been found to be most effective in stopping tumor development in laboratory mice," Duffy said.
When will the treatment be available to patients?
Overexpression of EGFR and HER2 molecules also characterizes other types of cancer, such as lung cancer, and the results of the present study suggest that melitin may be an effective treatment for these cancers as well.
However, there is a difference between killing cancer cells in a petri dish under laboratory conditions or doing it inside the human body, so the researchers stress that it may be a long time before we see bee venom used in treatments for cancer patients.
"Further studies will be needed to evaluate the degree of toxicity of these peptides and its maximum dose that humans can bear, before clinical trials on humans can begin," the researchers wrote.
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