The strangely adorable and resilient tardigrade, or water bear, just might hold the key to making cancer treatment a lot more (water-) bearable. That’s because a team of researchers just found evidence that a protein produced by these microscopic creatures could protect our healthy cells from the ravages of radiation therapy.
Scientists at MIT, the University of Iowa, and elsewhere conducted the new study, published this Wednesday in Nature Biomedical Engineering. In experiments with mice, the research team observed that the protein reduced radiation damage in normal cells, while still allowing the radiation therapy to target cancerous cells. The findings could someday lead to an invaluable add-on treatment for many cancer patients, the researchers say.
Tardigrades are extremophiles, notorious for their remarkable ability to survive some of the most inhospitable conditions on Earth (and space). One of the conditions the hardy critters evolved to withstand is extreme doses of radiation—thousands of times more than a human can handle—and one of the tricks they use to resist that radiation is the production of something called the damage suppressor protein, or Dsup. This protein, as the name implies, is thought to suppress radiation-induced DNA damage by binding to DNA strands and preventing them from breaking apart as usual.
The research team decided to test whether it was possible to safely transfer the tardigrade’s body armor against radiation to other animals, starting with mice.
Using mRNA technology, the team made it possible for certain cells in its mice to temporarily produce Dsup (only a few hours), then they exposed the cells to radiation. The researchers specifically chose cells lining the mouth and rectum, since radiation is commonly used to treat cancers in these areas.
Just as with tardigrades, the team’s mice appeared to have added protection against radiation damage, the researchers found. In experiments with mice that had oral cancer, they also demonstrated that the mRNA therapy didn’t impair radiation’s ability to kill off nearby tumor cells.
“The strategy may be broadly applicable to the protection of healthy tissue from DNA-damaging agents,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Of course, this research still is a long way from being applicable to human cancer patients, and it will take more study and tweaking to make this technology safe and practical for medical use.
The scientists plan to create an upgraded version of the protein that’s less likely to provoke an unwanted response from our immune system, for instance. Researchers elsewhere have also recently discovered tardigrades that are even more resistant to radiation, suggesting that Dsup isn’t the only radiation-proofing tool we can borrow from them. But if the team’s work does continue to progress, it could eventually provide widespread benefits to the roughly 50 to 60% of cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy.
The protein could even possibly be used to protect astronauts from space-related radiation or to protect cancer patients from other sources of treatment-induced DNA damage, such as chemotherapy drugs, the researchers say.
“Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting,” study co-author Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told MIT News. “There’s an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue.”
Tardigrades have long been one of the most fascinating animals around because of their manifold invulnerabilities. If we’re lucky, we might one day harness a bit of that superpower for ourselves.