Colon cancer is a devastating disease. It is one of the leading causes of death from cancer, even after decades of research. Scientists have found that cancer changes the way cells use nutrients to grow rapidly and spread to other parts of the body. Inside cancers cells, specialized factors called enzymes help cancer do this. These enzymes help cancer cells use particular nutrients to keep growing and living. There is one kind of enzyme, called creatine kinases (CKs), that are extremely important for colon cancer cells but not for healthy ones. Because of this, we think we might be able to create a medicine that attacks CKs to treat colon cancer without affecting the rest of the body.
We have developed a new medicine that stops CKs and is effective at killing cancer cells that need CKs to live. Our plan is to develop this medicine to work in animals with colon cancer. This is the critical first step before we can try it in people. If we succeed, we could have a brand-new way to fight colon cancer by stopping the CK enzymes that cancer needs to grow and spread. We hope that this new treatment could be very strong against colon cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.
