Poison that heals: Deadly gallium kills ‘greedy’ cancer cells with 99% accuracy

In a medical breakthrough, scientists have discovered a new potential treatment for bone cancer.

The new treatment includes bioactive glasses, a filling material that can bond to tissue and improve the strength of bones and teeth. When combined with gallium, the glasses could kill cancer cells.

Lab tests have found that bioactive glasses doped with the gallium have a 99% success rate of eliminating cancerous cells and can even regenerate diseased bones.

Highly toxic gallium

The research was conducted by a team of Aston University scientists led by Professor Richard Martin.

Professor Martin is also partnered with the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham, a leader in orthopedic oncology specializing in diagnosing, treating, and researching benign and malignant tumors of bone and soft tissues.

In laboratory tests, 99% of osteosarcoma (bone cancer) cells were killed off without destroying non-cancerous normal human bone cells.

The researchers also incubated the bioactive glasses in a simulated body fluid, and after seven days, they detected the early stages of bone formation.

Gallium is highly toxic, and the researchers found that the ‘greedy’ cancer cells soak it up and self-kill, which prevented the healthy cells from being affected.

Their research paper, Multifunctional Gallium Doped Bioactive Glasses: a Targeted Delivery for Antineoplastic Agents and Tissue Repair against Osteosarcoma, has been published in the journal Biomedical Materials.

Removing cancer

Osteosarcoma is the most commonly occurring primary bone cancer, and despite the use of chemotherapy and surgery to remove tumors, survival rates have not improved much since the 1970s.

Survival rates are dramatically reduced for patients who have a recurrence, and primary bone cancer patients are more susceptible to bone fractures.

Despite extensive research on different types of bioactive glass or ceramics for bone tissue engineering, more research is needed on the targeted and controlled release of anti-cancer agents to treat bone cancers .

“There is an urgent need for improved treatment options and our experiments show significant potential for use in bone cancer applications as part of a multimodal treatment,” Professor Martin said.

“We believe that our findings could lead to a treatment that is more effective and localized, reducing side effects, and can even regenerate diseased bones.”

He added, “When we observed the glasses, we could see the formation of a layer of amorphous calcium phosphate/hydroxyapatite layer on the surface of the bioactive glass particulates, which indicates bone growth.”

To conduct trials using gallium

The Aston University labs created the glasses by rapidly cooling very high-temperature molten liquids (1450 degrees celsius) to form glass.

The glasses were then ground and sieved into tiny particles, which can then be used for treatment.

In previous research, the team achieved a 50 percent success rate, but although impressive, this was not enough to make it a potential treatment.

The team is hoping to attract more research funding to conduct gallium trials.

The next step of the team’s work is now split into two fronts: testing the anti-cancer properties of this material on bone metastatic cells and developing a minimally invasive injectable paste for bone cancer application.