Study: Light Used to Target Cancer Cells

Credit to Huey Freeman of the Epoch Times for reporting an American study by T.-J. Oh, V. Krishnamurthy, J.W. Han et al titled “Spatiotemporal Control of Inflammatory Lytic Cell Death Through Optogenetic Induction of RIPK3 Oligomerization”.

The researchers used a gene from a plant of the mustard family that can be activated by light. This gene is then attached to the protein RIPK3 that regulates necroptosis—in other words, triggers a process that kills cancer cells in a targeted way.

Here, we developed light-activatable RIPK3 (La-RIPK3) system based on CRY2olig, an Arabidopsis thaliana crytochrome variant undergoing blue-light inducible oligomerization. La-RIPK3 activation causes MLKL-mediated upregulation of cytokine production and plasma membrane rupture in HT-29 cells. A bulk transcriptomics analysis showed that RIPK3 oligomerization upregulates genes involved in cellular stress response and cytokine signaling but downregulates those in cell survival pathways. When a patterned light illumination is applied, localized lytic cell death occurs within user-defined regions of interest. Our study employs optogenetic approaches to delineate signaling output from RIPK3-centric necrosomes during inflammatory lytic cell death. This strategy can be generalized to dissect distinct contributions from other signaling nodes within the cell death pathway.

Well, let’s hope this doesn’t get suppressed by Big Pharma that loves chemo.

Figure 1A: Schematic of canonical and noncanonical necroptosis pathways. 1B: An illustration of blue-light-activated necroptosis via activation of RIPK3.

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