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"Magic Bullet" Cancer Therapy Can Kill, Warns Research PARIS (AFP) - A "magic bullet" treatment for cancer, due to be tested on patients just months from now, could inflict fatal liver damage and should be left on the shelf, scientists warn. They say the treatment was so toxic to human liver cells in laboratory experiments that it should not proceed to clinical trial, when it will be administered to a test batch of cancer patients. The agent is called tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand, or TRAIL. It has receptors that lock onto the surface of a cell and induce a molecular cascade, which causes the cell to commit suicide, a programmed death known as apoptosis. Tested successfully on laboratory animals, TRAIL is one of the most promising paths in the decades-long quest for a "magic bullet" - a molecule that destroys tumors but leaves healthy cells untouched. Writing in May's issue of the US-published journal Nature Medicine, University of Pittsburgh researchers say they tested TRAIL on liver cells taken from rats, mice, rhesus monkeys and humans. Normal cells taken from the animals were not affected - but 60% of the human cells were wiped out within just 10 hours, a "massive and rapid" rate. "These results indicate that there are species differences in sensitivity to TRAIL, and that substantial liver toxicity might result if TRAIL were used in human cancer research," they write. In an adjoining commentary, Japanese cancer expert Shigekazu Nagata said this was "an alarming finding that should warn researchers to proceed with great caution into clinical trials involving TRAIL." He said "it may not be too late" to delay clinical trials, due to start at the end of this year, until researchers had a better understanding as to how some human cells are also targeted by TRAIL
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