Washington: Researchers have now finally been able to manufacture a sizable amount of a fungus that produces cancer-cell killing compounds.
For the first time they have developed a way to synthesize a cancer-killing compound called rasfonin in enough quantity to learn how it works.
Derived from a fungus trichurus terrophius, the chemical tricks certain cancer cells into suicide while leaving healthy cells untouched.
"In 2000, scientists in Japan discovered that this compound might have some tremendous potential as a prototype anti-cancer agent, but no one has been able to study or develop it because it's so hard to get enough of it from natural sources," says a professor of chemistry, Robert K Boeckman.
"You either grow the fungus that makes it, or you go through a complicated chemical synthesis process that still yields only a minute amount," he says.
After five years of effort, the scientists have worked out a process that lets researchers finally produce enough rasfonin to really start investigating how it functions and how they might harness it to fight cancer, the professor explains.
In 2000, researchers from Chiba University in Japan and the University of Tokyo simultaneously discovered a compound in certain fungi that selectively destroyed cells depending upon a gene called ras—one of the first known cancer-causing genes.
They had found rasfonin, a compound that seemed tailor-made to knock out ras-dependent cancers like pancreatic cancer.
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