Honeybee venom - An Anti-cancerous Agent
The researchers went on to synthesize a key component in honeybee venom, called Melittin, to continue their studies without impacting the honeybee populations.
Currently, Dr. Edina Wang has enthusiastically taken on this project, striving to improve the melittin compound and make it more effective by the addition of components that will enhance the way it recognizes and targets cancer cells.
Dr. Edina Wang has also begun testing the targeted melittin on ovarian cancer cells and found that they are extremely effective with a six-fold improvement in anti-cancer outcomes over the melittin alone.
The team is also looking into derivatives of honeybee venom to see if there are more components within the venom that might act as a powerful anti-cancer ingredient. There are hundreds of different elements that make up the honeybee venom and while melittin is one of the most abundant and potent components, the researchers aim to produce the most effective combination of cancer cell targeting and kill rate.
The team has also discovered a protective mechanism from a honeybee component that keeps healthy cells unaffected by melittin. There is still a lot of research to delve into and to learn how to harness these discoveries, therefore your support is helping world-class researchers move closer to solving these big and important problems.
A prestigious international journal NPJ Nature Precision Oncology revealed that honeybee venom rapidly destroyed triple-negative breast cancer and HER2-enriched breast cancer cells.
We found that melittin can completely destroy cancer cell membranes within 60 minutes.”
Melittin in honeybee venom also had another remarkable effect; within 20 minutes, melittin was able to substantially reduce the chemical messages of cancer cells that are essential to cancer cell growth and cell division.
“We looked at how honeybee venom and melittin affect the cancer signalling pathways, the chemical messages that are fundamental for cancer cell growth and reproduction, and we found that very quickly these signalling pathways were shut down.
“Melittin modulated the signalling in breast cancer cells by suppressing the activation of the receptor that is commonly overexpressed in triple-negative breast cancer, the epidermal growth factor receptor and it suppressed the activation of HER2 which is over-expressed in HER2-enriched breast cancer,” she said.
Dr Duffy also tested to see if melittin could be used with existing chemotherapy drugs as it forms pores, or holes, in breast cancer cell membranes, potentially enabling the entry of other treatments into the cancer cell to enhance cell death.
The combination of melittin and docetaxel was extremely efficient in reducing tumour growth in mice.
PROCEDURE
“I began with collecting Perth honeybee venom. Perth bees are some of the healthiest in the world.
“The bees were put to sleep with carbon dioxide and kept on ice before the venom barb was pulled out from the abdomen of the bee and the venom extracted by careful dissection,” she said.
While there are 20,000 species of bees, Dr Duffy wanted to compare the effects of Perth honeybee venom to other honeybee populations in Ireland and England, as well as to the venom of bumblebees.
“I found that the European honeybee in Australia, Ireland and England produced almost identical effects in breast cancer compared to normal cells. However, bumblebee venom could not induce cell death even at very high concentrations".
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