Two novel approaches targeting cancer cell membrane for tumor therapy.

Disruption of normal cell function by chemicals, UV radiation or viruses can cause various cancer. Drugs that have been developed for cancer therapy bind to various targets to correct disorder cell behavior, repair damaged DNA or promote cell apoptosis. However, there is rare study that focuses on cancer cell membrane as target. We propose two approaches for achieving our goal. One is to use phospholipase A2 (PLA2) to cleave phospholipid heads of the bilayer of cancer cells. Because PLA2 has unique Ca2+ catalytic site and the pH of healthy tissue cells should be slightly alkaline at 7.2–7.5, it can be easily protected by CO32− in the form of PLA2–CaCO3. While PLA2–CaCO3 accumulate in cancer cells in the acidic microenvironment of which the pH is below 7, it could be converted to active state (PLA2-Ca2+) which can intensively damage the cancer cell membrane. The other one is to use both monoclonal antibodies and dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO). The internalization of targeted cancer cell antibodies could change the curvature of cell membrane from order state to disorder state, therefore strong detergent DMSO can destroy cancer cells at extreme low concentration. These two approaches present no harm for normal cells, therefore, drugs targeted cancer cell membrane might become a new and high effective clinical cancer therapy.