Radioactivity can save lives. When neither chemotherapy nor surgery nor radiation from the outside help against a tumor, modern medicine uses so-called radiopharmaceuticals. These radioactive drugs not only detect cancer cells, but also enable targeted radiation from the inside
Radioactivity can save lives. When neither chemotherapy nor surgery nor radiation from the outside help against a tumor, modern medicine uses so-called radiopharmaceuticals. These radioactive drugs not only detect cancer cells, but also enable targeted radiation from the inside to destroy the tumor.
Even before potentially toxic side effects of a new drug are of interest, the binding characteristics matter most. They tell scientists whether the new drug can interact with its target cancer cell and how robust the interaction is. Therefore, binding studies are conducted in order to measure the binding strength and the amount of the drug that is bound to the target cell.
However, before such substances become available for use in humans, extensive animal testing is currently required during their development. A joint project of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology IWS in Dresden and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) is currently researching an alternative method to this. Artificial organ structures and tumors in chip format form the basis for this.
In a first publication, in Current Directions in Biomedical Engineering, researchers of Fraunhofer IWS and HZDR show in detail how this works.
In 2021, a total of 1.86 million vertebrates and cephalopods were used for research purposes in Germany, according to information from the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Although this is 2 percent less than in the previous year, it is still a very large number. The animals most commonly used in German laboratories are mice, fish and rats.
“Currently, many research tasks require the help of such animal experiments to be solved,” Dr. Wiebke Sihver from the HZDR’s Radionuclide Diagnostics Department points out. This is why searching for alternative options remains enormously important, she adds. “In addition, animal models often lack important references to the human organism.”
In their work, Sihver and her HZDR colleagues are concerned with the development and application of radiolabeled substances for cancer diagnostics, and specifically for therapy. These radioligands are labeled with a radioactive nuclide (radionuclide) and bind to a target molecule; in the case of cancer, to specific target structures of the tumor.
The radiopharmaceutical thus acts directly on the tumor. Surrounding healthy tissue is spared. To date, radiopharmaceuticals developed at the HZDR must be tested in animal models such as mice and rats after in vitr