Calcium channel as a potential anticancer agent

Summary 

Anticancer treatment in modern clinical practices includes chemotherapy and radiation therapy with or without surgical interventions. Efficiency of both methods varies greatly depending on cancer types and stages. Besides, chemo- and radiotherapy are toxic and damaging that causes serious side effects. This fact prompts the search for alternative methods of antitumor therapy. It is well known that prolonged or high increase of intracellular calcium concentration inevitably leads to the cell death via apoptosis or necrosis. However, stimulation of cell calcium level by chemical agents is hardly achievable because cells have very sophisticated machinery for maintaining intracellular calcium in physiological ranges. This obstacle can be overridden, nevertheless. It was found that calcium channels in so called calcium cells in land snails are directly regulated by extracellular calcium concentration. The higher the concentration the higher the calcium intake is through the channels. Bearing in mind that extracellular/intracellular calcium concentration ratio in human beings is 10,000–12,000 fold the insertion of the channel into cancer cells would lead to fast and uncontrollable by the cells calcium intake and cell death. Proteins composing the channel may be extracted from plasma membrane of calcium cells and sequenced by mass-spectrometry or N-terminal sequencing. Either proteins or corresponding genes could be used for targeted delivery into cancer cells.