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U niversity College Dublin scientists make breakthrough

Irish researchers have used cutting-edge technology to ‘force’ cancer cells to become healthy in a major breakthrough in the fight against serious diseases.

C ancer cells have been converted into healthy cells using AI-based data analysis technology developed by a University College Dublin team of researchers at the Systems Biology Ireland (SBI) research institute.

The UCD-based researchers report today in the journal Nature that they have changed neuroblastoma cancer cells into ‘close to healthy’ cells, using their new AI and machine-based learning technology, which they call ‘cSTAR’.

“This is like the invention of the microscope because it is the first time we can look inside a diseased cell, understand exactly what is happening in there, what’s going wrong, and suggest how it can be fixed,” says Professor Walter Kolch Director of SBI.

Cells might be thought of as biological factories, producing proteins and chemicals.

Communication between the different parts of the factory is key to ensuring that the whole entity is working efficiently.

Up to now, it hasn’t been clear why these little ‘biological factories’ malfunction, and become diseased.

The SBI data analysis technology does that by first identifying that something in the factory is misfiring, finding where the problem is, and finally offering solutions to fix it.

“In this paper, we have built on the fundamental work of SBI researchers to understand cellular gene and protein networks that control the life of cells,” said Professor Boris Kholodenko, who led the research effort.

“Like many leading laboratories in the world, we have a long-standing interest in understanding how to control the cell states or fates,” says Prof Kholodenko.

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“Where our work differs is in its use of machine learning, advanced computational and physical approaches and models with the ultimate goal of creating digital twins to precisely model human diseases and targeted interventions to cure these diseases.”

A digital twin, in the context of health, refers to a virtual version of a cell, tissue, organ, or even a person, containing all its relevant biological data.

“In the future, it is anticipated that everyone may have a digital twin created for them at birth, which follows them throughout their life,” says Dr Oleksii Rukhlenko SBI, the first author on the Nature paper.

The cSTAR technology will initially be applied to the huge problem of resistance to drugs, in cancer, and many other diseases by suggesting what drug or drug combination may work best in patients that are resistant to their prescribed drug therapy.

“About 80pc of people don’t respond to the drugs on the market today according to a paper in Nature in 2015,” says Prof Kolch.

“The biggest selling drugs we have are only effective in between 4pc and 20pc of patients across a spectrum of disease,” says Prof Kolch.

“That is absolutely shocking, but we believe that with our new technology we can push the figures up to 30pc or 40pc,” he says.

In the longer term, cSTAR can push the pharmaceutical industry further down the personalised medicine model and away from traditional costly, and expensive efforts to find new, highly profitable, blockbuster drugs.

It can take up to 15 years, and cost billions, says Prof Kolch, to get a new drug to market. This technology can speed that process up and reduce the time that industry spends randomly searching for new drugs.

The c-STAR technology can also revolutionise the promising field of regenerative medicine, where scientists are using stem cells to repair diseased, aged, or damaged cells.

“Our technology offers greater control over disease cell repair than using stem cells,” says Prof Kolch.

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